Research on short-term dynamic ice cases for dynamic analysis of ice-resistant jacket platform in the Bohai Gulf

Jacket platforms in the Bohai Gulf are often victims of random ice-induced vibrations. Their design originally did not account for dynamic ice loading on the jacket structures and significant ice-induced vibrations have been observed during winters. So it is urgent to find out as to how to consider the dynamic ice loading in the design stage of an ice-resistant jacket platform in the Bohai Gulf. In this paper, based on the state-of-art developments of dynamic ice load and ice–structure interaction, the authors proposed two different approaches to determine the short-term dynamic ice cases for dynamic analysis of ice-resistant jacket platform in the Bohai Gulf, named as the failure probability-based approach and the expected loss-based approach. Considering the variation of the ice environments and the variability of ice-resistant structure's properties, the random ice spectrum and the pseudo-excitation method (PEM) are employed to improve the efficiency of the procedure. Through finite element method (FEM) modeling of the real ice-resistant jacket platforms in the Bohai Gulf, such as MSW, MUQ and NW, the characteristics of the two proposed approaches have been investigated and compared. This paper provides an open and universal framework to assist designers and owners for determining the short-term dynamic ice cases in the Bohai Gulf, in which more information can be considered in the procedure to update and modify the results if available.