FEM analysis of deepwater drilling risers under the operability and hang-off working conditions

Abstract

In recent years, numerous exploration activities of oil and gas industry have been conducted in ultra deep water. The global offshore industry is building systems today for drilling in even deeper water, progressively using new technologies, and significantly extending existing technologies. This is the general trend in the offshore oil and gas industry. So the technology of ultra-deepwater risers, which is the main tool in drilling oil, is more and more standard. This paper manly focuses on the global analysis of the drilling risers. And it is divided into two parts, operability analysis and hang-off analysis that are used to check the design of the riser. In this paper, the rotation angle and stress of the riser in the drilling mode are calculated to determine the operability envelop. The number of the buoyancy modules has been determined and according to the API standard, all the worked out values have been checked out. From all the above, it is concluded that the operability envelop is relatively small under harsh condition and the number of the buoyancy modules is a little large. And above all, the design of this riser is successful.

Keywords

drilling riser / operability / hang-off / FEM analysis