Prototyping and testing of composite riser joints for deepwater application

The high strength to weight ratio, good corrosion resistance, and excellent fatigue property make carbon fiber-reinforced plastics a competitive material solution to replace steel in deepwater riser application. In this work, scaled-down composite riser joints were fabricated using a filament-winding machine. The prototypes comprise several carbon fiber-reinforced plastic layers wound over an aluminum liner. They consist of a middle tubular section and two metal-composite interface end fittings for the transfer of load between joints. A series of mechanical tests, including tension and combined tension-bending loading tests were performed to characterize their structural capacity and evaluate the improvement in performance over a purely metallic mandrel. In addition, finite element analyses incorporating elastic–plastic properties of the metallic liner, interfacial failure, and complex carbon fiber-reinforced plastics failure modes were carried out. The numerical predictions are in good agreement with the experimental measurements. The experimentally verified FE framework was then extended to design and analyze a full-scale composite riser model for performance prediction to accelerate the application of composite risers by shortening product development cycle and reducing prototyping costs.

Schlagworte

deep sea oil riser

marine composites

filament winding

trap-lock end fitting

multi-axial testing

DDC Class

620: Ingenieurwissenschaften

Lizenz

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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0731684415607392.pdf

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2.3 MB

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Adobe PDF

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Prototyping and testing of composite riser joints for deepwater application