Study on Efficient Time Domain Fatigue Analysis of Mooring Chain by Representative Mean Position

Abstract

This paper addresses the concept of the representative mean position, which was devised to improve the numerical efficiency of a time domain fatigue analysis of a mooring chain. To investigate the influence of an artificial offset of the floater on the fatigue of the mooring chain, a parametric study was performed on the moored FPSO under various combinations of offsets and environmental conditions. Tension time histories were calculated using the de-coupled analysis method, and fatigue damages were calculated to determine the influence of the offset. The parametric study was extended to a more realistic case to determine the actual effect of the representative mean position, where a comparison was made between the two different analysis results, one using the representative mean position and the other one using the actual mean position. It was confirmed that the application of the representative mean position guaranteed the conservatism of the fatigue damage with the enhanced numerical efficiency in the time domain fatigue analysis.

Keywords

• Mooring line
• Fatigue damage
• Representative mean position
• De-coupled analysis
• Offset