On the long-term extreme response of a floating offshore structure using reduced-order surrogate models
摘要
The quantification of uncertainties in various forms must be considered for the safe operation of offshore floating structures because the surrounding environment is inherently stochastic and ever-changing. Uncertainties in loads applied on structures can arise from two main sources: long-term and short-term uncertainties. Long-term uncertainty results from the changing sea states (conditions that change several times each day), while short-term uncertainty results from irregular wave characteristics that prevail during any of these sea states that might last from, say, 1 to 6 h. To address these uncertainties in an efficient manner, this study proposes a surrogate modeling method combined with a dimension-reduction approach to predict the long-term extreme response of an offshore floating structure. A subject of particular interest is one of accurate prediction of response levels associated with a low occurrence probability. The proposed method consists of two steps: (1) model order reduction in the frequency domain for the short-term response analysis and (2) gradient-based stochastic dimension reduction for the long-term dynamic response analysis. For efficiency, polynomial chaos expansion is used to construct surrogate models based on the reduced-dimension representation. Surrogate model-based extreme response predictions are compared with full-blown and costly Monte Carlo simulation results obtained using the original (truth) model. Accuracy and efficiency are demonstrated through numerical examples.