Mitigation of Flow-Induced Vibration of Steel Catenary Risers with Pounding Tuned Mass Damper

Steel catenary risers (SCR) have been widely used in the offshore oil industry. This paper proposes using a novel vibration control device, i.e., the pounding tuned mass damper (PTMD), to mitigate the flow-induced vibration of an SCR. The numerical model of the SCR and the PTMD has been established in ANSYS. The soil-pipe interaction is simulated by nonlinear springs based on p-y curves. A single degree of freedom structure is utilized to verify the PTMD model established in ANSYS using APDL. Afterwards, numerical studies are carried out to validate the vibration control performance of the proposed PTMD and to investigate the influence of mass ratio and the location of the PTMD. The numerical results imply that the PTMD is very effective in reducing the displacement of the SCR under different oceanic conditions. The vibration control effectiveness will increase with the increase in mass ratio. The maximum vibration reduction is achieved when the PTMD is located at the place where the largest amount of motion takes place.