Elevation Calculation of Bottom Deck Based on Stochastic Process and Compound Distribution

Abstract

In the design of offshore platforms, the height of the bottom deck directly affects the safety and engineering cost of the entire platform. It is a very important scale parameter in platform planning. The American Petroleum Institute (API) specification shows that the key to determining the height of the bottom deck lies in the wave height and calculation of the return level of the water increase. Based on the perspective of stochastic processes, this paper constructs a new distribution function model for joint parameter estimation of the marine environment. The new model uses a family of random variables to show the statistical characteristics of design wave height and water increase in both time and space, with extreme value expanded EED-I type distribution used as marginal distribution. The new model performs statistical analysis on the measured hydrological data of the Naozhou Station during the flood period from 1990 to 2016. The Gumbel–Copula structure function is used as the connection function, and the compound distribution model of the wave height and the water increase is used to obtain the joint return level of the wave height and the water increase and through which the bottom deck height of the area is calculated. The results show that the stochastic compound distribution improves the issue of the high design value caused by simple superposition of univariate return levels. The EED-I type distribution still has good stability under the condition of less measured data. Thus, under the premise of ensuring the safety of the offshore platform, less measured data can still be used to calculate the height of the bottom deck more accurately.

Keywords

• deck elevation
• stochastic process
• extreme value expansion
• joint probability
• joint return period