TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZATION OF OFFSHORE PLATFORM STRUCTURE PANEL AND EXPERIMENTAL VALIDATION

Abstract

Design of offshore platform structures is strictly guided by recognized codes and standards (RCS). The series of procedure on offshore structure design is called rule scantling. These regulations and guidelines are mostly empirical and arebased on some old-fashioned but reliable safety factor approaches such as working stress design (WSD) or allowable stress design (ASD). Although these codes and standards provide a firm layout of offshore structure, it often result in overconservative design which causes millions of dollars of extra construction cost. In this research, to enhance the structural performance and to suggest a new novel design of offshore structures, we performed a topology optimization based on solid isotropic material with penalization method (SIMP) on a designing process of an offshore platform structure panel. A volume constraint is applied in the optimization problem to utilize same material compared to the rule scantling offshore platform panel design. Since Bendsøe and Kikuchi introduced concept of topology optimization based on the homogenization method, topology optimization has been widely utilized to obtain an optimal structural connectivity to satisfy the required performances. However, optimal design obtained asa result of topology optimization have limitations to apply directly to the design of offshore structures. Inherently, since it relies on the mesh of analysis method, optimal desi