Structural Health Monitoring of Fixed Offshore

Jacket Platforms

Mohd Khairi Abu Husain, PhD

Razak Faculty of Technology and Informatics, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia,

Jalan Sultan Yahya Petra, 54100 Kuala Lumpur, MALAYSIA

Public Lecture Synopsis

Majority of the offshore platforms in the world are of steel jacket design. An increasing
number of jacket platforms are passing their assigned lifetime both on the Malaysia
water and other parts of the world. Jacket structures are robust platforms used mainly
in shallow waters due to its rigid dynamic characteristics. The jacket is in general
designed to withstand parameters as weight of topside, impact loads, wind loads,
loads from current, corrosion and fatigue. Exposure of these parameters during a
design lifetime will affect the structural integrity of the structure.

Assigned lifetime for a jacket is not an exact age, but the mean age can
approximately be estimated to be 30 years. The reasons for extending the lifetime of
platforms is due to factors like cost savings, increased use of subsea tiebacks and
technology advancements. Such technology advancements are for example within
extended reach drilling. This has led to an increased importance of life extension and
evaluation of the structural integrity.

To ensure safe use, prevent failures and control further degradation, the structural
health monitoring (SHM) may an important tool. SHM can be considered as a tool for
evaluating structural integrity and remaining lifetime. Implementing SHM may cause
an increase in procurement and installation cost, but it may in the long term result in
a decrease in operational costs and maintenance. Therefore there has been great
attention to the field of SHM in the last decades. This includes improvements in the
sensor robustness, accuracy, efficiency and lower cost. In addition to evaluating the
structural integrity, SHM can be a tool to optimize design criteria of future structures by
calibrating todays design coefficients based on real historical data.