Numerical vs. Experimental Predictions of Yaw Motion of Single Point Moored Vessel

The accurate prediction of SPM vessel yaw motion is important to its mooring system design. Inconsistencies have been observed between the numerical and model test predictions of offloading responses. In some cases, the numerical simulation predicted unstable yaw behavior of the vessel (fishtailing) while the model tests did not show such instability. This discrepancy between experiment and theory casts doubt as to whether the numerical simulation predicts correctly the vessel yaw motion. The work presented in this paper investigates the following two hypotheses to possibly explain the non-expected fishtailing in the numerical simulations: The mooring software may not accurately integrate non-linear differential equations that describe the yaw motion of the SPM vessel. Some damping terms may be under-estimated in the software (user input issue). To validate the integration scheme of the system of non-linear differential equations as implemented in the mooring software, a stability analysis has been conducted on a shuttle tanker moored to a West Africa deep water buoy. Variations of parameters like the hawser length, its axial stiffness and the vessel’s drag coefficients have been studied to explore their impacts on the vessel yaw stability. The approach is to identify without performing any time domain simulations, the domains of stability by linearizing the differential equations of SPM vessel’s yaw motion around its equilibrium point. The validity of the developed approach is then confirmed by performing time domain simulations of the same case. The second conjecture which may explain the non-expected fishtailing in numerical simulations was that some damping terms may be under-estimated. A semi empirical formula for the drag moment can be derived from rotation tests and comparisons were performed with the engineering model implemented in the mooring analysis software. The results show that by calibrating this damping term with the one derived from the experiments, the numerical simulations would match the stable yaw motion behavior as predicted during model tests. Following the above findings, a tool has been developed to fit the yaw drag moment engineering model based on experimental measurements, for any case of mooring analysis.