Sensitivity of Mooring Line Pretension in the Design Cycle for Floating Caissons

Author(s):  
Adinarayana Mukkamala ◽  
Partha Chakrabarti ◽  
Subrata K. Chakrabarti

The new parallel Tacoma Narrows Bridge being constructed by Tacoma Narrows Constructors will be mounted on two towers and these towers in turn will be supported by reinforced concrete caissons referred to as East Caisson (Tacoma side) and West Caisson (Gig Harbor side). Each Caisson is towed to the location and several stages of construction will take place at the actual site. During construction, the floating caissons will be moored in place to hold it against the flood and ebb currents in the Narrows. During the mooring system design, a desired pretension is established for the lines at each draft. However, due to practical limitations in the field some variations to this design pretension value may be expected. It is important to study the effect of this variation on the overall performance of the mooring system. In this paper, the sensitivity of the mooring line pretension on the overall performance of the mooring system for the above caisson is presented. During this study, all the variables that affect the mooring system design such as mooring system layout, mooring line makeup, anchor positions, fairlead departure angles, and fairlead locations are kept constant. The only variable changed is the pretension of the mooring lines. Two approaches for defining the variations in the pretension have been studied in this paper. In the first approach, the pretension is changed in a systematic way (predicted approach). In the second method the pretension is changed randomly. The latter is considered more likely to occur in the field for this type of complex mooring system. Both sets of results are presented for some selected drafts attained by the caisson during its construction. The difference in the results from the two methods is discussed.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amir Muhammed Saad ◽  
Florian Schopp ◽  
Asdrubal N. Queiroz Filho ◽  
Rodrigo Da Silva Cunha ◽  
Ismael H. F. Santos ◽  
...  

Abstract A failure in the mooring line of a platform, if not detected quickly, can cause a riser system failure, extended production downtime, or even environmental damages. Therefore, integrity management and timely detection of mooring failure for floating platforms are critical. In this paper, we propose a new model for an ANN-based mooring failure detection system. The proposal’s idea is to train a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) to estimate the platform’s future motion based on its motion’s temporal data without failure. A classifier then indicates whether or not there is a failure in the mooring system based on the difference between the predicted and the measured motion. The results with several tests of the implemented system show that our proposal can correctly predict the motion of the platform in most environmental conditions. The system shows a precision, accuracy and F1-score of 99.88%, 99.99% and 99.94%, respectively, for detecting changes in platform motion in near real-time, quickly signaling a possible breakage of mooring lines.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Lucas De Melo Costa ◽  
Asdrubal N. Queiroz Filho ◽  
Ismael H. F. Santos ◽  
Rodrigo Augusto Barreira ◽  
Anna Helena Reali Costa ◽  
...  

Abstract Offshore production facilities play a central role in the oil industry given the growing demand for energy resources. The mooring system of these floating structures is a critical component for safety maintenance. The timely identification of mooring lines failures can prevent environmental pollution, property losses and further system failures. In this paper we propose a system to detect and classify failures of the mooring lines based on the natural period in the longitudinal axis and in the lateral axis of the long drift oscillatory motion of the platform. The proposal starts from the hypothesis that when a line break occurs, the natural period of oscillation of the platform is increased, and this difference may indicate the malfunction of the mooring system. The proof of concept developed for the proposed system demonstrates the potential of using the natural period to detect failures in mooring lines for floating vessels, validating the initial hypothesis that the difference in a natural period appears when a line breaks and that this difference may detect line break.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 103
Author(s):  
Dongsheng Qiao ◽  
Binbin Li ◽  
Jun Yan ◽  
Yu Qin ◽  
Haizhi Liang ◽  
...  

During the long-term service condition, the mooring line of the deep-water floating platform may fail due to various reasons, such as overloading caused by an accidental condition or performance deterioration. Therefore, the safety performance under the transient responses process should be evaluated in advance, during the design phase. A series of time-domain numerical simulations for evaluating the performance changes of a Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) with different broken modes of mooring lines was carried out. The broken conditions include the single mooring line or two mooring lines failure under ipsilateral, opposite, and adjacent sides. The resulting transient and following steady-state responses of the vessel and the mooring line tensions were analyzed, and the corresponding influence mechanism was investigated. The accidental failure of a single or two mooring lines changes the watch circle of the vessel and the tension redistribution of the remaining mooring lines. The results indicated that the failure of mooring lines mainly influences the responses of sway, surge, and yaw, and the change rule is closely related to the stiffness and symmetry of the mooring system. The simulation results could give a profound understanding of the transient-effects influence process of mooring line failure, and the suggestions are given to account for the transient effects in the design of the mooring system.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willemijn Pauw ◽  
Remco Hageman ◽  
Joris van den Berg ◽  
Pieter Aalberts ◽  
Hironori Yamaji ◽  
...  

Abstract Integrity of mooring system is of high importance in the offshore industry. In-service assessment of loads in the mooring lines is however very challenging. Direct monitoring of mooring line loads through load cells or inclinometers requires subsea installation work and continuous data transmission. Other solutions based on GPS and motion monitoring have been presented as solutions to overcome these limitations [1]. Monitoring solutions based on GPS and motion data provide good practical benefits, because monitoring can be conducted from accessible area. The procedure relies on accurate numerical models to model the relation between global motions and response of the mooring system. In this paper, validation of this monitoring approach for a single unit will be presented. The unit under consideration is a turret-moored unit operating in Australia. In-service measurements of motions, GPS and line tensions are available. A numerical time-domain model of the mooring system was created. This model was used to simulate mooring line tensions due to measured FPSO motions. Using the measured unit response avoids the uncertainty resulting from a prediction of the hydrodynamic response. Measurements from load cells in various mooring lines are available. These measurements were compared against the results obtained from the simulations for validation of the approach. Three different periods, comprising a total of five weeks of data, were examined in more detail. Two periods are mild weather conditions with different dominant wave directions. The third period features heavy weather conditions. In this paper, the data set and numerical model are presented. A comparison between the measured and numerically calculated mooring line forces will be presented. Differences between the calculated and measured forces are examined. This validation study has shown that in-service monitoring of mooring line loads through GPS and motion data provides a new opportunity for mooring integrity assessment with reduced monitoring system complexity.


Author(s):  
Gang Zou ◽  
Lei Wang ◽  
Feng Zhang

As the offshore industry is developing into deeper and deeper water, station keeping technics are becoming more and more important to the industry. Based on the dynamic positioning system, the thruster assisted mooring system (TAMS) is developed, which consisted of mooring lines and thrusters. The main function of the TAMS is to hold a structure against wind wave and current loads with its thruster and cables, which is mainly evaluated by the holding capacity of the system. The arrangement of the mooring lines (location of anchor or the mooring line angle relative to platform) will directly affect the TAMS holding capacity because of the influence of the directions of the mooring forces. So finding out an optimum arrangement of the mooring lines is essential since the performance of the TAMS depends greatly on the arrangement of the mooring lines. The TAMS of a semi-submersible platform, which is studied in this paper, consisted of eight mooring lines. By fixing the layout of the thrusters and changing the location of each mooring line for every case, the performances of the TAMS are analyzed. The platform motions, mooring line tensions and power consumptions are compared to obtain the optimum arrangement of mooring lines, and thus a thruster assisted mooring system with a better performance can be achieved. Time domain simulation is carried out in this paper to obtain the results.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (6) ◽  
pp. 2824-2831 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sang-Won Ji ◽  
Myung-Soo Choi ◽  
Young-Bok Kim

1980 ◽  
Vol 102 (2) ◽  
pp. 62-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. A. Ansari

Relative to the present-day need for offshore operations involving the use of moored vessels, mooring system design has become quite complex. Since a proper choice of mooring line components in the form of anchors, clump weights, chains and cables is vital for vessel station-keeping and mooring system survival, the adequacy of the mooring system under consideration must be checked out by suitable analysis techniques. This paper gives a general discussion of the various mooring line components available for use, presents an analysis tool to determine the stiffness characteristics of a multicomponent cable including the effect of line stretch, and demonstrates how these could be included in the dynamic analysis of an offshore construction vessel moored by a multileg anchoring system. The maximum limiting tension of the mooring line considered, which is a combination of anchors, clump weights, chains and cables is determined from the several breaking strengths and anchor capacities associated with the various cable configurations that can occur. Finally, in order to illustrate a practical application, the dynamic response of a moored production barge subjected to external environmental forces is examined.


Author(s):  
Amany M. A. Hassan ◽  
Martin J. Downie ◽  
Atilla Incecik ◽  
R. Baarholm ◽  
P. A. Berthelsen ◽  
...  

This paper presents the results of an experiment carried out on a semi-submersible model to measure the steady drift force and low frequency surge motions. In the experiments, the influence of mooring systems was also investigated in different combinations of current and sea state. The measurements were carried out with a 1/50 scale model which was moored using horizontal springs and catenary mooring lines. A comparative study of the mean values of steady drift motions and the standard deviation of the low frequency motion amplitudes is presented. In addition, the effect of current on the damping ratio is discussed. It is found that for both horizontal and catenary moorings, the presence of a current increases the damping ratio of the system. For the catenary mooring system, as expected, the presence of mooring lines and their interaction with waves and current increases the damping compared to the damping of the horizontal mooring system. The measured mean values of the surge motions in a wave–current field are compared to the superposed values of those obtained from waves and current separately. For the horizontal mooring, it is found that there is good agreement in moderate sea states, while in higher sea states the measured motion responses are larger. In the wave-current field, the standard deviation of the surge motion amplitudes is found to be less than that obtained in waves alone. This can be explained by the increased magnitude of the damping ratio. Only in the cases of high sea states with the horizontal mooring system, was it found that the standard deviation of the surge motions is slightly larger than those obtained for waves and current separately. This may be explained by the absence of catenary mooring line damping.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (24) ◽  
pp. 8303
Author(s):  
Shi Liu ◽  
Yi Yang ◽  
Chengyuan Wang ◽  
Yuangang Tu ◽  
Zhenqing Liu

Floating wind turbine vibration controlling becomes more and more important with the increase in wind turbine size. Thus, a novel three-bifurcated mooring system is proposed for Spar-type floating wind turbines. Compared with the original mooring system using three mooring lines, three-bifurcated sub-mooring-lines are added into the novel mooring system. Specifically, each three-bifurcated sub-mooring-line is first connected to a Spar-type platform using three fairleads, then it is connected to the anchor using the main mooring line. Six fairleads are involved in the proposed mooring system, theoretically resulting in larger overturning and torsional stiffness. For further improvement, a clump mass is attached onto the main mooring lines of the proposed mooring system. The wind turbine surge, pitch, and yaw movements under regular and irregular waves are calculated to quantitatively examine the mooring system performances. A recommended configuration for the proposed mooring system is presented: the three-bifurcated sub-mooring-line and main mooring line lengths should be (0.0166, 0.0111, 0.0166) and 0.9723 times the total mooring line length in the traditional mooring system. The proposed mooring system can at most reduce the wind turbine surge movement 37.15% and 54.5% when under regular and irregular waves, respectively, and can at most reduce the yaw movement 30.1% and 40% when under regular and irregular waves, respectively.


Author(s):  
Partha Chakrabarti ◽  
Subrata K. Chakrabarti ◽  
Adinarayana Mukkamala ◽  
Nagaraj Anavekar ◽  
Shen Qiang ◽  
...  

Tacoma Narrows Constructors (TNC) is building a new suspension bridge in Tacoma, close to Seattle, Washington State, USA. The new bridge will be built just south of the existing bridge mounted on two caissons, referred to as East Caisson (Tacoma side) and West Caisson (Gig Harbor side). Each pier is about 80’ wide and 130’ long in plan. The mooring system for each caisson consists of two sets of mooring lines: lower and upper. Each set consists of 16 mooring lines. The lower 16 lines consist of anchors that form a radius of about 300 feet. The fairlead locations for these lower 16 lines are kept constant throughout the construction process. These 16 lines are hooked-up after the caisson is towed from the harbor and positioned at the site. For the upper 16 lines (except three lines on East Pier), the anchor locations form a radius of 600’. The fairlead locations for these upper 16 lines vary based on the draft. Due to the proximity of the proposed caissons to the existing piers and the varying bottom topography, considerable turbulence and vortex shedding is expected which will cause current induced dynamic forces on the caissons. This paper describes the design and analysis of this multi-line mooring system for Tacoma Narrows Bridge caissons, based on the construction sequence in the floating condition. The analysis involved optimizing the anchor locations and the line pretensions, determining the dynamic motions of the caissons, maximum line loads, and corresponding safety factors. The paper includes the hydrodynamic analysis for added mass, and damping, the methodology used for the nonlinear moored caisson analysis (MOTSIM), and the validation of the design tool with other similar models (e.g., StruCAD*3D). The results of the analysis and design are discussed.


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