During the last years, the oil and gas industry has moved into new frontiers, whichrequire more complex mooring solutions. The failure rate is unacceptably high, with43 incidents for the Norwegian Continental Shelf alone, between 2000 and 2013. It istherefore interesting to compare the mooring system design tools used by the industry,and to investigate the behaviour of a damaged mooring system.The focus has been split between a comparison of mooring analysis in time domainand frequency domain, and an investigation of an accidental limit state(ALS) mooringanalysis. The goal of the comparison was to understand the theory behind both methods,to verify, adopt, and simplify numerical models, and to perform analyses with thenumerical models and compare the results. The frequency domain software MIMOSAand the time domain software SIMO/RIFLEX coupled, with the SIMA graphical userinterface, were used for the analyses. The numerical simulation was initially meant tobe performed for two entirely dierent mooring systems, but due to problems, only acatenary mooring system has been analysed. The analyses show that the tension inthe mooring lines and the oset of the moored vessel are comparable for both methods.The frequency domain yields the most conservative results, which is expected due tolinearisations and simplications made.For the ALS analysis, the behaviour of a damaged mooring system was analysed. Thiswas performed in time domain only, with a catenary mooring system, where one mooringline was broken. The analysis investigated the increased load on the remaining mooringlines, and also the eect of when the mooring line failed. The analysis show that for theremaining mooring lines in the cluster with a broken line, the mean tension increases by21% and the max tension increases by 25%. Further analyses showed that the brokensystem was still robust against failure, with only a 0.03% chance of further failure,when entering a 100-year storm with one line broken and 100% minimum breakingstrength (MBS). With a MBS degraded to 80%, the chance of failure was only 1.38%.The transient motion phase after a line failure was not necessarily the governing designcriterion. For the specic condition analysed, the tension in the mooring lines was lower when a mooring line failed during the storm, than it was when the failure took placebefore the storm. This means that the ultimate limit state design criterion was governingfor this condition.
展开▼
