Nonlinear Analysis of Mooring Lines and Marine Risers

摘要

With the oil and gas development in deep water, floating offshore structures, such as Spars, Floating Production, Storage and Offload (FPSO) and semi-submersibles, are becoming increasingly important. For these moored offshore platforms, second-order responses in waves are of great importance. In order to accurately predict the second-order load and motion characteristics of floating structures in the design process, it is essential to develop an accurate and robust numerical tool for the static and dynamic analysis of mooring lines and marine risers. The mooring line analysis requires consideration of geometric and load nonlinearity and bottom conditions. To account for the dynamics of mooring lines, the global-coordinate-based finite element method was used to model mooring lines and marine risers. This method was first introduce by Garrett (1982) for inextensible slender rod, and later extended by Paulling and Webster (1986) to allow for small elongation of the slender rod.