Environmental Load Modeling for Offshore Malaysia Regions

Rapid expansion of oil and gas industry in
20th century increased the demand for accurate and
reliable environmental load prediction. With the
increase in natural disasters like tsunami, typhoon, and
rise in water level from global warming, it is very
important for engineers to model the environmental
load accurately. Eight fixed offshore jacket platforms
with four, six and eight-legged configurations and with
K and X type bracings were chosen for this study.
Three sets of environmental data for ten, fifty and
hundred year conditions covering three regions in
Malaysia were selected. Peninsular region was observed
to encounter the highest environmental loading of about
21 MN followed by Sabah region with 3.6 MN and
Sarawak region with 3.4 MN. The dominant load
direction was from North and North East from the open
South China Sea. This was logical since most of the
fixed offshore platforms in Malaysia are located at
about 30 to 150 km distance from shore. Apart from
the location, the size, appurtenances and marine growth
of the fixed offshore platforms impacted the load. From
these findings, engineers can now use different design
approaches and redundancy arrangements for the
different regions in Malaysia for reducing the cost
without compromising the safety of the structure.