Design of Truncated Mooring Line Model in KRISO's Deepwater Ocean Engineering Basin

Abstract

The present work was an attempt to investigate the applicability of truncated mooring systems to KRISO's deep ocean engineering basin (DOEB) with ratios of 1:100, 1:60, and 1:50. The depth of the DOEB is 15 m. Therefore, the corresponding truncated depths for this study were equal to 1500 m, 900 m, and 750 m. The investigation focused on both the static and dynamic characteristics of the mooring system. It was shown, in a static pull-out test, that the restoring force of a FPSO vessel could be modified to a good level of agreement for all three truncation cases. However, when the radius of the mooring site was reduced according to the truncation factor, the surge motion response during a free-decay test showed a significant difference from the full-depth model. However, the reduction of this discrepancy was achieved by increasing the radius up to its maximum possible value while considering the size of the DOEB. Especially, in terms of the time period, the difference was reduced from 24.0 to 5.3 s for a truncation ratio of 1:100, 54.1 to 8.6 s for a truncation ratio of 1:60, and 31.7 to 3.9 s for a truncation ratio of 1:50. As a result, the study verified the applicability of the truncated mooring system to the DOEB, and therefore it could represent the full-depth mooring system relatively well in terms of the static and dynamic conditions.