Marine and underwater structures, such as seawalls, piers, breakwaters, and pipelines, are particularly susceptible to seismic events. These events can directly damage the structures or destabilize their supporting soil through phenomena like liquefaction. This review examines advanced numerical modeling approaches, including CFD, FEM, DEM, FVM, and BEM, to assess the impacts of earthquakes on these structures. These methods provide cost-effective and reliable simulations, demonstrating strong alignment with experimental and theoretical data. However, challenges persist in areas such as computational efficiency and algorithmic limitations. Key findings highlight the ability of these models to accurately simulate primary forces during seismic events and secondary effects, such as wave-induced loads. Nonetheless, discrepancies remain, particularly in capturing energy dissipation processes in existing models. Future advancements in computational capabilities and techniques, such as high-resolution DNS for wave-structure interactions and improved near-field seismoacoustic modeling show potential for enhancing simulation accuracy. Furthermore, integrating laboratory and field data into unified frameworks will significantly improve the precision and practicality of these models, offering robust tools for predicting earthquake and wave impacts on marine environments.
This paper presents a fully coupled solution in the time-domain, using the finite-differences method to the system of equations that model the dynamic behavior of the riser, blow-out preventer (BOP), and casing strings, when connected for well drilling/completion-the model is suitable to evaluate wellhead fatigue, even when the amplitude of oscillation and accelerations of the BOP are high. Sensibility analysis is used to show the effect of changing the Riser Top Tension to the resulting maximum values of wellhead bending moment and casing stress ranges. For the case where the rig is oscillating around a fixed position and there is no current, using a regular wave, the results show that there are some wave periods for which an increase in the Riser Top Tension reduces the maximum wellhead bending moment and the max casing stress range, therefore increasing fatigue life of the casing and wellhead. The effects of varying the weight of the BOP and soil parameters and the effect of the phase difference between the wave and first-order vessel motion are analyzed. The proposed solution can also be used to perform riser and casing analysis during drift-off/drive-off.