Optimization study of drilling riser guiding holes

With the increase of the water depth, strong wind, current and wave may exert great impact on the stability of drilling risers. In order to extend the service life of drilling risers, guiding holes may be adopted to decrease the fatigue stress and vortex stress of risers. In this paper, a mechanical model of drilling riser, taking into account the guiding holes, the structure’s gravity and all the other external loads, is established. An engineering example of optimized analysis has been solved successfully by using ANSYS. And the results show that the proposed drilling risers computing model has broad applicability, it may provide reliable theory guarantee for the engineering practice and bring certain economic benefits.