The design of offshore structures vary from one oil outfit to another. Locally, the American Petroleum Institute (API) standard has been used extensively in conjunction with the PETRONAS Technical Specifications (PTS). While the local approach is generally considered successful, there is a common trend now to optimize design further in view of escalating costs and the need to be focused on the intention of the offshore structure to support dwindling oil reservoirs. At the moment, there is a working technical group addressing this issue and producing a local design standard for offshore structures. Take for example the structural members in water which are mostly made up of tubular members to reduce drag effects. By having a circular shape, the shape factor for a tubular member is Cs=0.5 compared to Cs=1.5 for I -beams. Thus significant drag force can be reduced by using tubular members. The design code for the jackets with tubular members will usually comply with the American Petroleum Institute, Recommended Practice for Planning, Designing and Constructing Fixed Offshore Platforms - Working Stress Design also known as API-RP-2A-WSD. In the design for the foundation for example, consideration is made based on two variables: first, the piles which are typically long pipes driven into the soil, and second, the effects of the soil where the piles are driven. Due to the linear nature of the pile, and the nonlinear nature of the soil, the foundation analysis for the offshore structures is complicated owing to the interaction of a linear material with non-linear soil. This is normally termed as the Pile-Soil-Interaction or PSI analysis. In the approach of using a working Stress Design, the safety factors are mostly covered in the component parts which reside in the formulas to calculate the members, joints and the foundation safety factors, which is also known as the unity check (UC). However, due to the drive from component based to system based design, the sentiment is now geared towards a reliability based design code in the future such as the ISO (the International Organization for Standardization).

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