Composite riser design and development – a review: 5th International Conference on Marine Structures

There is accelerating interest in composite risers for deepwater applications. Composite risers offer much higher strength to weight ratios over metallic risers but there is less experience of their behavior in deepwater environments. A general review on current developments specific to composite risers highlighting the remaining challenges and the applications, design evolution, state-of-the-art modeling and experimental techniques is lacking. This paper provides such a review on fiber-reinforced polymer composite risers. The major issues for composite risers are addressed including the complicated combination of loads under harsh deep sea environment, the lack of long-term material degradation database for assessing the reliability of these riser systems and the need of effective numerical models to fully account for complex realistic loading configurations. The paper also highlights current gaps for design and application of composite risers in off-shore technology and promising future research areas to help expand their utilization in deeper water