Experimental Study on Towing Characteristics of Composite Bucket Wellhead Platform

With the rapid development of large-scale development of marginal oilfields in China, simple wellhead platforms that are simple in structure and easy to install have become an inevitable choice in the process of oilfield development. However, traditional simple wellhead platforms are often discarded after a single use. In pursuit of a more cost-effective approach to developing marginal oilfields, this paper proposes a new offshore oil field development facility—an integrated bucket foundation for wellhead platform. To verify the safety of its towing behavior and obtain the dynamic response characteristics of the structure, this paper takes a bucket integrated bucket foundation for wellhead platform with a diameter of 40 m as the research object. By combining physical model tests and numerical simulations, it analyzes the static stability and dynamic response characteristics of the structure during towing, complete with the effects of the draft, wave height, wave period, and towing point height, which produce the dynamic responses of the structure under different influence factors, such as roll angle, pitch angle, heave acceleration and towing force as well as the sensibility to transport variables. The results show that the integrated bucket foundation for wellhead platform is capable of self-floating towing, and its movement is affected by the local environment, which will provide a reference for actual projects.