Abstract
This study aims to systematically study the fatigue crack propagation characteristics of the mooring system for a floating production storage and offloading vessel (FPSO) through the fracture mechanics-based approach. The remaining fatigue life of the mooring lines is predicted by a self-integrated program through the simulation of the crack growth behavior. Additionally, parametric studies are performed to investigate the influence of initial crack status (location/size/shape) on mooring crack propagation characteristics. Results illustrate that the remaining fatigue life at the uppermost position of mooring lines at the wave-ward side is similar, which is approximately 178 years longer than that of mooring lines at the wave-back side. Fatigue issues are the severest in the crown region, where the critical fatigue life is about 49% of that in the bend region and 19.9% of that in the straight region. With the increase of the initial crack size and aspect ratio, the remaining fatigue life experiences a remarkable decrease with amplitudes up to 47.8% and 30.1% respectively. The integrated evaluation program is a promising tool for the damage tolerance design of mooring system due to the excellent capability in predicting the remaining fatigue life and charactering the crack growth behavior.
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