A Monte Carlo Approach to Prediction of Extreme Response Statistics of Drag Dominated Offshore Structures

The focus of the present paper is the extreme response statistics of drag dominated offshore structures subjected to harsh weather conditions. More specifically, severe sea states both with and without strong current are considered. The nature of the hydrodynamic forces acting on the structure becomes highly nonlinear. In addition to the drag forces, the so called inundation effect due to the wave elevation, corrected to include second order waves, is also taken into account. In the present paper, the Monte Carlo method along with a special extrapolation technique is applied. The proposed method opens up for the possibility to predict simply and efficiently long-term extreme response statistics, which is an important issue for the design of offshore structures.