Design of offshore structures against accidental ship collisions

• Comprehensive numerical analyses of collisions between supply vessels and offshore platforms are reported.
• Interaction effects between the colliding bodies during the deformation are discussed.
• Rule requirements for sufficiently safe design of offshore structures are evaluated based on numerical results.
• Early-phase design procedures for strength design is proposed for stiffened panel structures.
• A new compactness requirement for jacket columns is proposed, to ensure limited local denting in a collision event.

In this paper, we investigate the damage to offshore platforms subjected to ship collisions. The considered scenarios are bow and stern impacts against the column of a floating platform and against the jacket legs and braces. The effect of the ship–platform interaction on the distribution of damage is studied by modeling both structures using nonlinear shell finite elements. A supply vessel of 7500-ton displacement with bulbous bow is modeled. A comprehensive numerical analysis program is conducted, and the primary findings are described herein. The collision forces from the vessel are compared with the suggested force–deformation curves in the NORSOK code. For collisions with floating platforms we particularly focus on the crushing behavior and potential penetration of the bulbous bow and stern sections into the cargo tanks or void spaces of semi-submersible platforms. For fixed jacket platforms we investigate whether jacket braces can penetrate into the ship without being subjected to significant plastic bending or local denting.Adequate treatment of the relative strength between the interacting bodies is especially relevant for impacts with high levels of available kinetic energy, for which shared energy or strength design is aimed at. Simplifying one body as rigid quickly leads to overly conservative and/or costly solutions, and is in some cases non-conservative.The numerical analysis is used to develop a novel pressure–area relation for the deformation of the bulbous bow and stern corners of the supply vessel. Procedures for strength design of the stiffened panels are discussed. Refined methods and criteria are proposed for strength design of platforms, including both floating and jacket structures. The adequacy of the NORSOK design guidance for collisions against jacket legs is evaluated. The characteristic strength of a cylindrical column is used to develop a novel criterion for the resistance to local denting from stern corners and bulbous bows.