Design wave method for the extreme horizontal slow-drift motion of moored floating platforms

The present study introduces a design wave method for estimating the extreme horizontal slow-drift motion of moored floating offshore platforms under extreme conditions. Here, the design wave refers to an irregular incident wave of short duration that induces the extreme response of the desired return period. The present method is composed of the following four steps: linearization of the dynamic system, probabilistic analysis of the second-order Volterra series, generation of the irregular design waves, and the fully-coupled nonlinear simulations. For generating the design waves, two different conditioning methods are presented and compared: the conditioning of the extreme response amplitude and the conditioning of the most likely extreme response profile. The procedure was applied to a deep water semi-submersible, and the results appeared to be promising compared to the full-length nonlinear simulations. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.