Short-term probability distribution of the extreme values of offshore structural response by an efficient time simulation technique

Offshore structures are exposed to random wave loading in the ocean environment and hence the probability distribution of the extreme values of their response to wave loading is required for their safe and economical design. Wave loading on slender members of bottom-supported jacket structures is frequently calculated by Morison's equation. Due to nonlinearity of the drag component of Morison wave loading and also due to intermittency of wave loading on members in the splash zone, the response is often non-Gaussian; therefore, simple techniques for derivation of their extreme response probability distributions are not available. To this end, the conventional time simulation technique (CTS) is frequently used for predicting the probability distribution of the extreme values of response. However, this technique suffers from excessive sampling variability and hence a large number of simulated response extreme values (hundreds of simulated response records) are required to reduce the sampling variability to acceptable levels. In this paper, a more efficient version of the time simulation technique (ETS) is introduced to derive the probability distribution of response extreme values from a much smaller sample of simulated extreme values. The ETS procedure is found to be many times more efficient than the CTS method.