Pelamis Fatigue Damage Calculator Plugin for Abaqus

Pelamis Fatigue Damage Calculator Plugin

The Pelamis Fatigue Damage Calculator plugin is a tool for calculating the life and fatigue damage of offshore structures. Because Abaqus/fe-safe is not specifically designed to use DNV-RP-C203, the Pelamis Fatigue Damage Calculator plugin can be a suitable tool in addition to hand calculations for designing and estimating the life of offshore structures. Damage or life results can be viewed as a contour plot.

The Pelamis FDC Plugin Features

• The possibility of selecting a specific area of the structure (Node set) or the entire structure (All nodes)
• The possibility of choosing the stress component (maximum principal stress, Mises, etc.)
• Ability to choose the number of bins (4, 8, 16, 32, 64)
• Support for two stress units (Pa & MPa)
• Ability to choose SN fatigue class
• Ability to add SN class to the library (needs scripting)
• Possibility to choose a lifetime of 1, 5, 10, and 20 years
• Has a coefficient to calculate damage in sea conditions
• The possibility of reporting the history of stress time, rainflow count, and damage for each node
• The plugin has an almost complete manual (46 pages in PDF and CHM).

DNV-RP-C203

The DNV-RP-C203 relates to the fatigue design of off-shore steel structures and focuses primarily on the fatigue of welds. But it can be used for steels with yield stress less than 960 MPa, bolts, and also stainless steels. DNV-RP-C203 is mainly prepared to calculate high-cycle fatigue damage. Section 2.3.1 of the standard outlines three methodologies for fatigue analysis based on S-N curves. These are:

• The nominal stress method
• The hotspot stress method
• The notch stress method

DNV SN Curves

The SN Curves are a series of stress S against the number of cycles to failure N curves determined using extensive testing and in this instance published by DNV, these cover different materials features, and details within the structure, as summarized in the following table for Pelamis relevant examples. The SN curve plots for these curves can be seen in Appendix B DNV SN Curves.

Who this plugin is for:

• Engineering or science students and professionals who working on  fatigue analysis of offshore structures
• Advanced students, Ph.D. students, or researchers for their Abaqus FEA projects
• Any Abaqus Application Engineer who is involved with various simulation projects daily

What you’ll gain