Automated System for the Study of Environmental Loads Applied to Production Risers

Recent discoveries of petroleum reservoirs under deep waters have presented many new technical challenges involved with the design of the offshore production systems used. Optimization of these systems is a critical part of the design stage to insure their safety and economical viability. This paper focuses on the study of petroleum production risers. A riser is essentially a long tube or set of tubes that allow the transfer of fluids and tooling to and from the platform and undersea well. Due to non-linearities involved in the analysis of these systems, numerical methods are used to analyze riser dynamics. Evaluation of the proposed system under a wider variety of environmental loads is a crucial step in the overall design process. This paper presents the use of modern computational resources to streamline the evaluation of a wide variety of environmental loads with the goal of optimizing the riser design by the generation, processing and visualization of parametric studies. A self-optimizing system that processes and executes numerical simulations using individual computers and clusters will also be presented.