Environmental load modeling for offshore Malaysia regions

Abstract

Rapid expansion of oil and gas industry in 20th century increased the demand for accurate and reliable environmental load prediction. With the increase in natural disasters like tsunami, typhoon, and rise in water level from global warming, it is very important for engineers to model the environmental load accurately. Eight fixed offshore jacket platforms with four, six and eight-legged configurations and with K and X type bracings were chosen for this study. Three sets of environmental data for ten, fifty and hundred year conditions covering three regions in Malaysia were selected. Peninsular region was observed to encounter the highest environmental loading of about 21 MN followed by Sabah region with 3.6 MN and Sarawak region with 3.4 MN. The dominant load direction was from North and North East from the open South China Sea. This was logical since most of the fixed offshore platforms in Malaysia are located at about 30 to 150 km distance from shore. Apart from the location, the size, appurtenances and marine growth of the fixed offshore platforms impacted the load. From these findings, engineers can now use different design approaches and redundancy arrangements for the different regions in Malaysia for reducing the cost without compromising the safety of the structure.