Sharif Digital Repository

Iran plateau is situated over the Alpide-Himalaya earthquake belt. Tectonic studies indicate that this plateau has a very high density of active and recent faults; as a result, Iran is at risk of damaging earthquakes. Experience of past severe earthquakes shows previous designed structures do not have enough strength instead of real earthquake forces, therefore vulnerability study of existing structures and give a technical and economical retrofitting plan of them is required. Conventional methods of seismic rehabilitation for example using concrete shear walls or steel braces are not suitable for some buildings. Nowadays, passive control systems have been successfully used for reducing the... 

This thesis encompasses a number of issues in earthquake engineering which may appear quite diverse in nature. Several methodological aspects of both conventional and novel approaches to probabilistic seismic hazard assessment are discussed here along with subjects more strictly pertinent to structural and geotechnical engineering. This work, however, has a unique, ultimate goal: to provide procedures for an effective and practical probabilistic estimation of structural demand of offshore platforms due to seismic ground shaking. In modern multi-level design and rehabilitation procedures, structural performance is in fact quantified by deformation demand levels exceeded with a specified... 

Structures face various loadings and confront different circumstances as they are built and used. This situation causes the aging structures to deteriorate, which would lead to a decrease in reliability and safety. In the recent decades, the need for systems to assure the integrity of structures in terms of their age, usage and level of safety when experiencing infrequent and extreme forces such as earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, large waves has deeply been recognized. These systems are often referred to as structural health monitoring (SHM) in the literature. The main objective of such system is to increase reliable operating lifetime. In the case of offshore structures, utilizing... 

Jacket type offshore platforms are classified as expensive and also strategic structures, and the cost of their maintanace is considerable. Therefore, any inspection and retrofit plans for life extension of the existing structures is economically and logically preferable rather than making decision for design and construction of new structures. The first stage of assessment plan is monitoring the performance of structure during critical loadings for which the structure is designed. One of the critical loads that should be considered in assessment of jacket structures is seismic loading. Due to dynamic nature of the applied loads in seismic assessment of jacket structures the accuracy of... 

A structural system will normally fail as a result of a chain of failures of different components. In this thesis, fatigue reliability of fixed offshore platforms is investigated through analyzing different failure scenarios. In order to evaluate the occurrence probability of a special scenario, each failure scenario is divided into a finite number of sub-scenarios. To do this, all combinations of time sequences are generated for a given sequence of failures, using a specially developed program.
In order to calculate the occurrence probability of each scenario, a massive reliability analysis should be done for each of corresponding sub-scenarios. Knowing that there are a large number of... 

In this thesis, a novel probabilistic framework named Probabilistic Spectral Fatigue Analysis (PSFA) will be introduced for the purpose of assessing the performance of jacket offshore platforms under high-cyclic short-waves fatigue degradation. This method can take into account the uncertainties in three main elements consisting of material properties, sea state parameters and collapse capacity of structure. The main advantage of PSFA approach is the ability to recognize the fatigue failure scenarios and specifies the limit state function of critical members as a super-branch or sub-branch of those scenarios. Therefore, a new and accurate method is proposed for combination of scenarios’... 

One of the most important elements of performance-based seismic engineering elements is precision in determination of seismic displacement demand evaluation. Although seismic demands which are estimated by utilizing non-linear dynamic analysis are most effective, but with regards to inherent complexities of these methods and demands for time-consuming calculations , non-¬linear static methods seems to be an appropriate representative and is recently considered by engineers. In countries with oil resources including Iran, offshore jacket platforms are among outstanding structures being considered. Inasmuch as high design and execution expenses of these structures and also important role of... 

Employing dampers to control wave-induced and seismic vibrations of offshore jacket platforms is an attractive method in order to mitigate fatigue and seismic damage. However, adjustable parameters of a damper are designed by considering only one type of environmental loads; either normal-condition load or extreme-condition load. So, it is important to investigate effectiveness of damping system, for both of two main categories of environmental loads. Also it is ideal for the system to have an acceptable performance in both normal and extreme conditions. The idea investigated in the current study is to use a friction damper device (FDD) and a tuned mass damper (TMD) simultaneously in... 

Extracting modal parameters is necessary for future vibration-based health monitoring studies of the structures. Due to the reason that it is difficult to measure the input excitation forces acting on a real large structure in its operational condition, it is preferable to use the output-only methods which estimate the modal model by using responses data only. Also, the output-only dynamic testing has advantages of being inexpensive since no equipment is needed to excite the structure and the service condition does not have to be interrupted.This paper presents the results of modal identification of an offshore jacket platform using output-only methods with the assumption of ambient... 

Offshore platforms are the most important and enormous wealth of each country that these structures are in situation thatthelikelihoodof damageinhigh. With considering this pointthatplatformsaresubjected to oscillatinglateralloads, so the occurrenceand growth offatigue crack sinthe misvery common. These cracks are always seen in jacket connections, cause these connections are bearing large forces and have massive welding and the presence ofresidualstresses. The fatigue crack caused negligible change in stiffness of connections and in consequence insignificant change in stiffness of structure; So for this reason, they are difficult to detect in global methods. Fiber optic sensors and... 

structures during their service life continually accumulate damage as a result of the action of various environmental forces. Clearly the development of robust techniques for early damage detection is crucial to avoid the possible occurrence of catastrophic structural failure. In a big picture we can divide process into two subcategories: first – we need modal properties of structure. In this case we install several motion sensors on structure and collect their data. Then use a group of methods named as System Identification Process to discover dynamic properties of structure as natural frequencies and mode shapes. Three famous system identification method have been used in this thesis and... 

Nowadays, many offshore jacket platforms have been built in all over the world for excavating oil and gas. Due to cost of construction and maintenance, they are considered as national assets. Jacket platforms are always under various types of loads in their time life, so they cause some damages to them. Hence, on time damage detection can prevent possible extravagant costs of repair and reconstruction. Because many jacket platforms are in Iran, this issue can be very important.Structural health monitoring (SHM) improvised to ensure safety and detect damages of structures uses sensors. They transfer data received from structures to the computers in order that after interpretation of data,... 

Marine risers are tubular components, which are used to transfer fluids between seabed and floating platform. They may have a great share in cost of oil and gas production systems. One of the risers used in deep-water, is Steel Catenary Riser which is an economic alternative. However, amongst issues in designing this type of risers, high stress level in floating platform connection point and seabed touch- down zone is notable which is created due to platform movements, currents and wave loading and finally, leads to fatigue life reduction. Using buoyancy modules which are attached to risers is one of stress levels reduction solutions in hotspot points. In this study, considering the Caspian... 

High construction and installation costs of offshore platforms, and also harsh environments in which they operate, make health monitoring of these structures more important. Conventional methods to solve the health monitoring problem are deterministic, whereas much uncertainties are imposed to the problem. In most methods of health monitoring methods we try to identify natural frequencies and mode shapes of structures by using its dynamic response. This set of data is then compared to results of modal analysis performed on a finite element model of structure in order to detect any possible damage. In deterministic methods each response of structure is pertained to one damage state, in a... 

Offshore platforms are one of the most important structures in oil-rich countries, so that their economic benefit makes it very expensive to stop their usage. Therefore, it is essential that their performance is not disrupted by earthquake or the tidal waves made by severe storms. According to statistics many of the offshore platforms of their design life pass and need an important loss inspection. The assessment of existing platforms is a relatively new process. The lack of comprehensive standard creates some difficulty in establishing performance requirements, on a case by case basis depending upon the risks associated with the future operations of the platform. In this study the criteria... 

Offshore platforms are of the economic life lines of oil rich countries. These infrastructures are located at severe environmental conditions, their construction and installation involves expense and these justify utilization of these structures with novel auxiliary vibration control device. Two passive vibration control systems have been evaluated in this study aiming to fatigue damage mitigation in offshore steel jacket platforms. Performances of tuned mass damper and friction damper to suppression of wave induced vibrations in fixed offshore platforms have been investigated in this study. Due to the random nature of ocean waves, a fully stochastic analysis method has been used to evaluate... 

In this thesis several methodological aspects of both conventional and novel approaches to probabilistic seismic hazard assessment are discussed here along with subjects more strictly pertinent to structural and geotechnical engineering. This work, however, has a unique, ultimate goal: to provide procedures for an effective and practical probabilistic estimation of structural demand of offshore platforms due to seismic ground shaking.In modern multi-level design and rehabilitation procedures, structural performance is in fact quantified by deformation demand levels exceeded with a specified annual frequency of structural life. We refer to this as Probabilistic Seismic Demand Analysis (PSDA).... 

Since oil is the essential foundation of Irans economy and our country has access to deep water, the extraction of oil from the deep water is essential to our country. So far, due to the possibility of oil exploration in the shallow water of the Persian Gulf, need to invest in deepwater oil industry has not been one of the priorities. However, it seems that in the near future we will need to invest in deepwater. Among subsea structures which we need to use to extract the oil in deepwater, we can mention wellhead manifolds that are used to expand the oil field, optimisation of pipeline length, gathering and distribution of production and injection of water or gas into the wells. In some cases... 

Assessment of existing jacket type offshore platform against environmental wave loading hazard is the central component of this work. Two general approaches exist in this context, deterministic and probabilistic assessment. In this study, a new probabilistic method (reliability analysis) to assess offshore structures under environmental loading (extreme wave) is introduced. Before describing this approach, several necessary elements such as collapse analysis, sampling methods and wave hazard analysis should be investigated. First of all, deterministic assessment of SPD2 platform located in Persian Gulf, which is the case study considered in this dissertation, is conducted utilizing... 

Ground motions in close proximity to the causative fault of an earthquake can be significantly affected by the propagation of rupture. In particular, when the rupture and slip direction relative to a site coincide and a significant portion of the fault ruptures towards the site, the ground motion can exhibit the effects of Forward-Directivity (FD). Pulse-like near-fault ground motions resulting from directivity effects are a special class of ground motions that are challenging to characterize for seismic performance assessment. These motions contain a pulse in the velocity time history of the motion, often occurring in the direction perpendicular to the fault rupture at locations near the...