Discussion on the design value of environmental condition in offshore structure design

Return period is generally adopted to calculate the design value of environmental condition in offshore structure design. However, it can not make relevant adjustment according to structure's, especially the mobile unit's, life time or its operation areas and usually make the design either insufficiently safe or rather uneconomical.A formula is developed to solve this problem in the case of the design wave height, where the risk, the design life, the distributions of wave heights in operation areas and the operating durations in each area are regarded as parameters. The applications of this method and the comparisons with the general method are presented. The result of this method is considered to be proper.