AM 5430: Stochastic Processes in Structural Mechanics Assignment 4

March 5, 2012 Last date for submission: April 23, 2014.

Instructions:

Please submit a report where all the steps involved in analytical calculations are written clearly and legibly. Email all your MATLAB codes together in a zipped format to gupta.sayan@gmail.com. The name of the zipped le should be your full roll no, example, AM10D001.zip. Attach print outs of your plots along with your report. Please print about 4 plots in one A4 page to save paper and ensure readability. Provide axis labels, captions and gure numbers to all your plots. Please ensure that you use dierent line styles in your plots so that the plots are discernible in b/w print outs.

Marks: 20 Modern wind-turbines are enormous structures and are usually built o the coast, in open seas. These wind turbines could be either oating type, which involves partially submerged masts, or xed type, which contains pier foundations with the masts xed to the piers. In either case, in the design of these masts, a crucial aspect of the load calculation is the force due to the ocean waves. As the force is proportional to the height of the sea-waves, the problem on hand is to characterize the sea-waves, which are random, in probabilistic terms. It is common practice to model the sea surface elevation at a xed point as a Gaussian process, X (t), which during a limited period of time ranging from 20min to 3 hours, can be considered to be stationary. The statistical properties of the sea surface elevation under stationary conditions are called a sea state. The sea state is characterized in terms of the PSD, S ( ), the mean sea level, m, referred to as the still water level usually set to zero 1

and the water depth d. An apparent wave is dened as the part of the sea record between two successive up-crossings of the still water level, m and the wave crest height, Ac , is the maximum of the apparent wave, i.e., the maximum value the process X (t) attains between two successive up-crossings of the level m. In reality, the exact spectral density S ( ) is usually not known; instead, the sea state is characterized by the signicant wave-height, Hs ,
2 Hs 16 and the zero-crossing wave period, Tz , i.e., the inverse up-crossing intensity of the still water 2 X =

given by,

level. The intensity of waves is by denition equal to the intensity of up-crossings of the still water level m by the process X (t). The crossing intensity + X (m) can be easily calculated using Rices formula. However, the crossing intensity of waves with crest higher than v is more dicult to compute. It can be shown that + X (h|S ) , P [Ac > h|S ] + X (m|S ) hm (1)

where, + X (h|S ) is the up-crossing intensity of the level h during the sea state S .

1. Show that for any Gaussian sea state, P [(Ac m) > h|S ] exp[8( h 2 ) ]. Hs

2. If at a location of a buoy, the sea has Tz = 10s and Hs = 10 m, estimate the probability that a crest height is above 10 m. 3. Consider now a deep water location having Pierson-Moskowitz spectrum of the form S PM ( ) =
2 Hs (/)5 exp 4

1 (/)4 ,

with Hs = 7 m and Tz = 10 s, plot the excedance probability obtained analytically as a function of wave height h, for the sea state S . Here, = 2/Tz . 4. In the same plot, compare the predictions of the exceedance probability obtained from Monte Carlo simulations. [Here, simulate N samples of time histories using spectral decomposition method and nd the probabilities of exceedance. Consider N = 1 10s , where s is at least 3. 2