MARITIME OPERATION SAFETY ASSESSMENT, USING SEAKEEPING CRITERIA, OF AN OFFSHORE BARGE IN THE CASPIAN SEA

References: 16th International Multidisciplinary Scientific GeoConference SGEM 2016, www.sgem.org, SGEM2016 Conference Proceedings, ISBN 978-619-7105-62-9 / ISSN 1314-2704, June 28 - July 6, 2016, Book3 Vol. 2, 783-790 pp

ABSTRACT
On offshore operations many accidents have occurred in the case of extreme sea state conditions. Therefore, the offshore systems have to be evaluated by seakeeping criteria, for specific sea areas, from the preliminary design steps. This study is focused on the assessment of an offshore barge design concept, as support platform for drill operations in the Caspian Sea. The barge has a total length of 96 m and 33 m breadth, with oblique bow shape at 40 deg. and a low free side height of 1.85 m. The environmental irregular sea waves are modeled by JONSWAP wave power density spectrum, with gamma peak factor of 3.3, for the significant waves’ height and peak period selected from the Caspian Sea waves’ scattering diagram. The short-term dynamic responses of the offshore barge motions are obtained by own developed software DYN_OSC. The seakeeping criteria are limiting the maximum values of the motions amplitudes, in order to ensure the operational safety conditions for the onboard personal of the offshore barge support platform. The study results are pointing out the effective seakeeping capabilities of the offshore barge design concept, preserving the operations safety in the Caspian Sea environment.

Keywords: safety, offshore barge, seakeeping, Caspian Sea.