Study of the Vortex-Induced Vibration of the Marine Risers With the Buoyancy

Abstract

Regarding the very large top tension of ocean deep water riser which is caused by the heavy self-weight, a innovated buoyancy system is designed. This system can effectively decrease the top tension and improve the performance of the riser movement. In order to study the upper and lower part of the floating system, a specialized model test is carried out, where the acceleration, amplitude, frequency and trajectory of the interested points along the risers are investigated. It has been observed that with the increase of the current speed, both the vibration acceleration and the vibration frequency are increasing but the bare riser amplitude is decreasing. At the speed of 0.2m/s, the resonance phenomenon is observed, but the same phenomenon is not observed for the middle floating riser subjecting to different flow velocities. At the speed of 0.4 m/s, the largest amplitude is captured. Due to the response differences of the floating riser at the up and down parts of the middle floating riser, when the amplitude is increasing, the vibration frequency is decreasing, both at cross flow (CF) direction and inline flow (IL) direction. Especially the vibration behavior of the interested points is most influenced by the buoyancy. Under different models, vibration at different flow velocities is presented along bare riser, the modal vibration effects of the floating riser will decrease In addition, according to the experiment condition, Orcaflex is applied to conduct the numerical simulation to get the vibration law of the corresponding feature points and compare it with the experimental results. The results indicate that the numerical analysis reasonably match with experimental results.