Search

Efficient design of wave energy converters requires an accurate understanding of expected loads and responses during the deployment lifetime of a device. A study has been conducted to better understand best-practices for prediction of design responses in a wave energy converter. A case-study was performed in which a simplified wave energy converter was analyzed to predict several important device design responses. The application and performance of a full long-term analysis, in which numerical simulations were used to predict the device response for a large number of distinct sea states, was studied. Environmental characterization and selection of sea states for this analysis at the intended deployment site were performed using principle-components analysis. The full long-term analysis applied here was shown to be stable when implemented with a relatively low number of sea states and convergent with an increasing number of sea states. As the number of sea states utilized in the analysis was increased, predicted response levels did not change appreciably. However, uncertainty in the response levels was reduced as more sea states were utilized.

Environmental contours describing extreme sea states are generated as the input for numerical or physical model simulations as a part of the standard current practice for designing marine structures to survive extreme sea states. These environmental contours are characterized by combinations of significant wave height ( H s ) and either energy period ( T e ) or peak period ( T p ) values calculated for a given recurrence interval using a set of data based on hindcast simulations or buoy observations over a sufficient period of record. The use of the inverse first-order reliability method (I-FORM) is a standard design practice for generating environmental contours. This paper develops enhanced methodologies for data analysis prior to the application of the I-FORM, including the use of principal component analysis (PCA) to create an uncorrelated representation of the variables under consideration as well as new distribution and parameter fitting techniques. These modifications better represent the measured data and, therefore, should contribute to the development of more realistic representations of environmental contours of extreme sea states for determining design loads for marine structures

In this manuscript, a generalized net-section-collapse (NSC) failure criterion of circumferentially cracked pipes with multiple arbitrary-shaped cracks is presented. This generalized NSC formulation is capable of predicting the NSC moment of a pipe with multiple arbitrary-shaped cracks distributed around the circumference of the pipe, regardless of whether they are distributed symmetrically or not. The case in which internal cracks straddle the compressive zone is accounted for in the present formulation. Closed form solutions are provided for the maximum moments of pipes containing multiple cracks with idealized shapes, namely constant depth, semi-elliptical and parabolic crack profiles. Through a series of examples, the results show the effectiveness and accuracy of the method. Using this method, quantification of the effect of the crack profile uncertainty on the maximum bending moment sustained by a cracked pipe is evaluated. It is demonstrated that while the uncertainty associated with the surface roughness of the crack profile has little to no effect on the maximum bending moment, irregular shape profiles have, not surprisingly, a large effect on the estimation of the maximum bending moment. In fact, it is mathematically shown that the uncertainty associated with the maximum bending moment is proportional to the magnitude of the crack profile uncertainty and inversely proportional to the square root of the uncertainty sampling size (i.e. surface roughness vs. irregular crack profile).