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