PETROBRAS Work using modeFRONTIER wins DOT 2008 Award
Dr. Mauro Costa de Oliveira of the Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering Department at the Petrobras Research Center (CENPES) has been using modeFRONTIER together with the stability program SSTAB and the hydrodynamics analysis tool, WAMIT, to size offshore structures since 2004. Last year he presented some of this work at the Deep Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, in a paper titled "Offshore Platform Sizing Optimization using Genetic Algorithms", which subsequently earned the award for the conference paper using the most innovative technology.
Mauro, a naval architect and the first user of modeFRONTIER in Brazil, created a workflow with only 5 geometric parameters, but numerous constraints, and the structure was analyzed for multiple conditions: quayside, transit and 2 different operating conditions. The objective was to minimize the vertical wave-induced motions that cause fatigue damage to the oil production risers, and to achieve this, Mauro used the NSGA-II algorithm in modeFRONTIER, with a population size of 10, and 500 generations. His excellent paper showed how using modeFRONTIER allowed him to obtain designs which not only gave low values of fatigue, but also met all the constraints imposed by the different operating conditions to which the platform was to be subjected.
The procedure described in the paper has been applied to the P-55 semi-submersible platform, currently under construction.
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Offshore Platform Sizing Optimization using Genetic Algorithms
Dr Mauro Costa de Oliveira
Petrobras CENPES
