Governing factors and locations of fatigue damage on mooring lines of floating structures

2015 ◽  
Vol 96 ◽  
pp. 109-124 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongyan Wu ◽  
Tao Wang ◽  
Øyvind Eide ◽  
Kevin Haverty
2002 ◽  
Vol 124 (2) ◽  
pp. 104-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Subrata K. Chakrabarti

A versatile and efficient numerical analysis is developed to compute the responses of a moored floating system composed of multiple floating structures. Structures such as tankers, semisubmersibles, FPSOs, SPARs, TLPs, and SPMs connected by mooring lines, connectors or fenders may be analyzed individually or collectively including multiple interaction. The analysis is carried out in the time domain assuming rigid body motion for the structures, and the solution is generated by a forward integration scheme. The analysis includes the nonlinearities in the excitation, damping, and restoring terms encountered in a typical mooring system configuration. It also allows for instabilities in the tower oscillation as well as slack mooring lines. Certain simplifications in the analysis have been made, which are discussed. The exciting forces in the analysis are wind, current, and waves (including a steady and an oscillating drift force), which are not necessarily collinear. The waves can be single frequency or composed of multiple frequency components. For regular waves either linear, stretched linear or fifth order theory may be used. The irregular wave may be included as a given spectral model (e.g., PM or JONSWAP). The vessels are free to respond to the exciting forces in six degrees of freedom—surge, sway, heave, roll, pitch, and yaw. The tower, when present, is free to respond in two degrees of freedom—oscillation and precession. The loads in the mooring lines are determined from prescribed tension-strain tables for the lines. Rigid mooring arms can be analyzed by allowing for compression in the load-strain table. Fenders may be input similarly through load compression tables. In order to establish the stability and accuracy of the solution, comparison of the results with linearized frequency domain analysis was made. The analysis is verified by several different model test results for different structure configurations in regular and random seas. Some of the interesting aspects of nonlinear system are shown with a few examples.


Author(s):  
Yuliang Zhao ◽  
Sheng Dong ◽  
Fengyuan Jiang

The harsh marine environment is a significant threat to the safety of floating structure systems. To address this, mooring systems have seen widespread application as an important component in the stabilization of floating structures. This article proposes a methodology to assess the reliability of mooring lines under given extreme environmental conditions based on artificial neural network–Bayesian network inference. Different types of artificial neural networks, including radial basis function neural networks and back propagation neural networks, are adopted to predict the extreme response of mooring lines according to a series of measured environmental data. A failure database under extreme sea conditions is then established in accordance with the failure criterion of mooring systems. There is a failure of mooring lines when the maximum tension exceeds the allowable breaking strength. Finally, the reliability analysis of moored floating structures under different load directions is conducted using Bayesian networks. To demonstrate the proposed methodology, the failure probability of a sample semi-submersible platform at a water depth of 1500 m is estimated. This approach utilizes artificial neural networks’ capacity for calculation efficiency and validates artificial neural networks for the response prediction of floating structures. Furthermore, it can also be employed to estimate the failure probability of other complex floating structures.


2021 ◽  
Vol 219 ◽  
pp. 108304
Author(s):  
Jian Dai ◽  
Bernt Johan Leira ◽  
Torgeir Moan ◽  
Hagbart Skage Alsos

Author(s):  
Huilong Ren ◽  
Jian Zhang ◽  
Guoqing Feng ◽  
Hui Li ◽  
Chenfeng Li

Coupled dynamic analysis between floating marine structures and flexible members such as mooring lines and risers, is a challenging work in the ocean engineering field. Coupled analysis on mooring-buoy interactions has been paid more and more concern for recent years. For floating offshore structures at sea, the motions driven by environmental loads are inevitable. The movement of mooring lines occurs due to the excitation on the top by floating structures. Meanwhile the lines restrict the buoy’s motion by forces acting on the fareleads. Positioning is the main function of mooring system, its orientation effects can’t be ignored for floating structures such as semi-submersible, FPS, and TLP, especially when the buoy’s equilibrium position shifting to another place. Similar as hydrostatic restoring forces, mooring force related with the buoy’s displacement can be transformed into mooring stiffness and can be added in the differential equations of motion, which is calculated at its equilibrium point. For linear hydrodynamic analysis in frequency domain, any physical quantity should be linear or be linearized, however mooring stiffness is nonlinear in essence, so the tangent or differential stiffness is used. Steel chains are widely used in catenary mooring system. An explicit formulation of catenary mooring stiffness is derived in this article, which consists of coupled relations between horizontal and vertical mooring forces. The effects of changing stiffness due to the shift of equilibrium position on the buoy’s hydrodynamic performance are investigated.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 960
Author(s):  
Chun Bao Li ◽  
Mingsheng Chen ◽  
Joonmo Choung

It is essential to design a reasonable mooring line length that ensures quasi-static responses of moored floating structures are within an acceptable level, and that reduces the cost of mooring lines in the overall project. Quasi-static responses include the equilibrium position and the line tension of a moored floating structure (also called the mean value in a dynamic response), etc. The quasi-static responses derived by the classic catenary equation cannot present mooring–seabed interaction and hydrodynamic effects on a mooring line. While a commercial program can predict reasonable quasi-static responses, costly modeling is required. This motivated us to propose a new method for predicting quasi-static responses that minimizes the mechanical energy of the whole system based on basic geometric parameters, and that is easy to implement. In this study, the mechanical energy of moored floating structures is assumed to be the sum of gravitational–buoyancy potential energy, kinetic energy induced by drag forces, and spring potential energy derived by line tension. We introduce fundamental theoretical background for the development of the proposed method. We investigate the effect of quasi-static actions on mooring response, comparing the proposed method’s results with those from the catenary equation and ABAQUS software. The study reveals the shortcomings of the catenary equation in offshore applications. We also compare quasi-static responses derived by the AQWA numerical package with the results calculated from the proposed method for an 8 MW WindFloat 2 type of platform. Good agreement was drawn between the proposed method and AQWA. The proposed method proves more timesaving than AQWA in terms of modeling of mooring lines and floaters, and more accurate than the catenary equation, and can be used effectively in the early design phase of dimension mooring lengths for moored floating structures.


Author(s):  
Zhiling Li ◽  
Carlos Llorente ◽  
Cheng-Yo Chen ◽  
Chang Ho Kang ◽  
Edmund Muehlner ◽  
...  

For the global performance analysis of a floater, the traditional semi-coupled method models mooring lines/risers as nonlinear massless springs and ignores 1) the inertial effects from mooring lines/risers, 2) the current and wave load effects on mooring lines/risers, and 3) the dynamic interaction between mooring lines/risers and the floater. However, these effects are deemed critical for deepwater and ultra deepwater floating structures as they may have a significant impact on the floaters’ motions and mooring line/riser tensions. This paper presents the development and verification of a time-domain nonlinear coupled analysis tool, MLTSIM-ROD, which is an integration of a recently developed 3D rod dynamic program, ROD3D, with the well-calibrated floater global performance analysis program, MULTISIM (Ref [9]). The ROD3D was developed based on a nonlinear finite element method and merged with MULTISIM by matching the forces and displacements of mooring lines/risers with the floater at their connections. MLTSIM-ROD can thus predict the floater’s large displacement/rotation motions and mooring line/riser tensions including all the coupled effects between the floater and mooring lines/risers. In this paper, global performance predictions for a SPAR in the Gulf of Mexico in deepwater were carried out using MLTSIM-ROD. The results were then verified with those from other coupled analysis programs. The paper also presents the results of motions and mooring line/riser tensions of the SPAR using both the coupled and semi-coupled methods. The results from the coupled and semi-coupled analyses indicate that the floater’s motions and mooring line/riser tensions could be significantly influenced by the dynamic interactions between the floater and mooring lines/risers. Hence, the coupled method needs to be considered for deepwater floating structures.


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