NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION ON THE HYDRODYNAMIC PERFORMANCES OF A NEW SPAR CONCEPT

Recently, the spar platform concept develops quickly in the offshore oil and gas exploitations, especially in deep and ultra-deep water, owing to its benign motion performance, excellent stability and adaptation to wide range of water depth. Many new spar concepts have been put forward with the purpose of reducing fabrication difficulty and cost, while meeting the requirements of exploitation in the meantime. Based on the aims mentioned above, a new spar concept was presented in this article and its hydrodynamics both in operating and survival conditions was studied by means of numerical simulation. Basic model tests were also conducted to calibrate the numerical approach. Following aspects are highlighted: (1) new spar concept, (2) global performance of the spar concept and (3) mooring line analysis.