Investigation of Punch Trough in a Typical Jack-up Unit during Jacking Operation

There are large resources of energy in the offshore fields, such as oil and gas fields in Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea. As a mobile offshore drilling unit (MODU), the jack-up platforms havethe potential of moving frequently from one site to another one and they are commonly used in offshore fields. Failure in self-elevated jack-up units may happen due to the punch trough under sever sea state conditions or may happen due to the punch trough during the jacking operation.The point is that this kind of failure happened in Iran Khazar jack-up rig in Caspian Sea several years ago. This paper investigates the punch through behavior of a typical jack-up unit during jacking operation by numerical simulation using ABAQUS software

Keywords:

Jack-Up rig , Punch trough , jacking operation , nonlinear static analysis