Reliability Analysis of Mooring Lines for Deep Water Floating Systems

Abstract

Reliability analysis of mooring lines requires an accurate prediction of extreme responses for large number of sea states even for a short-term based approach. In deep water, the interactions between the floater motions and the large number of risers and mooring lines become significant and must be considered for accurate prediction of floater motions as well as line dynamics. Time-domain coupled dynamic analysis procedures have been shown to give more accurate results but at a higher computational expense. Therefore, efficient computational tools are required for reliability analysis of mooring lines for deep water floating systems. Enhanced decoupled dynamic analysis method, in which the floater motions are computed by coupled analysis considering a coarse finite element model of the mooring line, is an efficient method and provides results comparable in accuracy with the fully coupled dynamic analysis procedures. This paper presents the application of enhanced de-coupled dynamic analysis method for reliability assessment of mooring lines for deep water floating systems. For reliability analysis of mooring lines, the methodology presented in Ding et al. [5] is adopted. Reliability analysis of a critically loaded mooring line for a deep water classical spar floater under extreme environmental loads is performed using environmental contour approach. Mooring line tension time histories under various storm conditions are calculated using enhanced de-coupled dynamic analysis. The uncertainty in the predicted maximum mooring line load due to different storm events, variability in met-ocean conditions and numerical models is considered. Probability of failure and the corresponding reliability index of the mooring line are calculated. The impact of variability in predicted mooring line load, line capacities and factors of safety on mooring line reliability are studied. It is seen that enhanced de-coupled dynamic analysis, which predicts the mooring line loads as accurately as coupled dynamic analysis with lesser CPU time, can be used more efficiently for reliability assessment of mooring lines for deep water floating systems.