A review on mooring lines and anchors of floating marine structures

Abstract

Marine resources and energy exploitation has driven the advancement of floating structures, e.g., the oil & gas platforms, the floaters to support floating wind turbines. Mooring systems, encompassing mooring lines and anchors, are adopted to position the floaters and restrict their motions due to the environmental loads. The evolving diversity of floating structures poses new challenges to mooring systems, needing to be summarized for further development. This review introduces the recent advancements in the research and application of mooring lines and anchors, and some crucial issues related to design and analysis are discussed. First, the applications of floating structures are reviewed, and different types of floaters are compared based on the characteristics. Subsequently, the mooring system classification and shared mooring line and anchor are reviewed and discussed, and then design principles and analysis methodologies of mooring systems are summarized. Furthermore, mooring line components are discussed, the modelling and analysis methods of mooring lines are introduced. A critical threat to mooring safety, seabed trenches, is scrutinized. Finally, various anchors are compared and summarized based on their capacities and installation methods. Some problems related to anchor long-term capacities are discussed. This review provides a guide on further research and applications of moorings and anchors, which targets to benefit more precise mooring and anchor design, potentially prompting significant cost reductions in the deployment of floating wind turbines.