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Offshore Technology Report Series

OTO 0059/1999 - Validation of inspection planning methods: summary report.

Fatigue is of significant concern for load bearing offshore structures in the North Sea. The present tools for predicting fatigue life or crack growth imply scattered estimates.There is a need for more reliable fatigue life and defect assessment procedure for the most frequent failure observed. The availability of a database of inspection data to correlate actual with predicted performance will assist the development of fatigue assessment procedures representing the observed growth. Describes the in-service observation of the data collected; calculation of the reliability estimate of observed events; quantitive comparison of the theoretical predications and in-service observations; the concept of adjustment factors; consequences of the results. Makes recommendations for further work.

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