Fatigue reliability of TLP tether systems

The tension lag platform (TLP) concept is considered to be economically competitive with other offshore production concepts in deepwater locations. The critical part of this concept regarding structural failure is the tether system, in which fatigue is an important failure mode. The present paper presents a computational efficient and general probabilistic procedure for estimating the fatigue reliability of the TLP tether system. Two crack growth rate models of single crack sites are applied. Among uncertainties accounted are those in the long-term stochastic load process, the fatigue strength, and the initial crack sizes.