Experimental Evaluation of Hydrodynamic Loads on Marine Risers

As the exploration of oceans for oil and gas goes to deeper depths, understanding the riser dynamics is fast becoming a key aspect of such systems’ design. The hydrodynamic loads acting on marine risers such as inertial and drag forces due to the relative motions between the riser and fluid, is of great concern for researchers and exploration systems’ designers. The lack of information regarding some conditions applied on risers systems nowadays, led to an experimental approach to understand the hydrodynamic loads on these conditions, to extract those information, and complement the available literature on this subject. This study provides new insights into the inertial and drag hydrodynamic coefficients (Cm and Cd respectively), how they evolve for higher KCs. These findings should make an important contribution expanding the understanding of the hydrodynamic loads on a circular cylinder. This paper first gives a brief overview of the recent research history of this subject and the theoretical background used, followed by the description of test setup and analysis method. Lastly, the results are presented and discussed in comparison with literature data.