An assessment of the existing industry capability to predict the responses of several types of deepwater floating production systems was developed through a project sponsored by the DeepStar industry consortia. As no data set was available for such an assessment, the assessment was developed by intercomparing responses predicted for several standard "theme structures" by various companies using their existing analysis tools and practices. Results of the assessment would then provide to the basis to characterize the uncertainty or scatter in existing analyses, and highlight areas that needed improvement. And the results would also be useful in planning model tests to provide data for validating and improving the analytical tools and practices. The theme structures used in this study were the TLP, Spar, and FPSO. A large number of companies elected to participate in providing their analyses of various theme structures. In this paper, results for the spars and TLPs are reported.
This project began as a consequence of the DeepStar-sponsored workshop held October 29–30, 1998. OTRC conducted this workshop entitled "Deepwater Mooring and Riser Analytical Capabilities" for the purpose of assessing industry capabilities and technology needs in the deepwater vessel motions, mooring system and riser analysis area. Results of the workshop indicated the top priority need to be comparative analyses of "theme structures" in 3,000 to 10,000 ft water depth and benchmarking these with model data (Ward and Hating, 1999; Ward et al., 1999). DeepStar Phase IV funded a comparative analysis study (Devlin, 1999), again managed by OTRC. In order to obtain the broadest possible sampling of industry analysis capabilities, the community of contractors/consultants known to work in the floating production systems field was inviteat to participate by contributing their analyses for one or more of the theme structures.
