A Nonlinear Restoring Effect Study of Mooring System and its Application

Mooring system plays an important role in station keeping of floating offshore structures. Coupled analysis on mooring-buoy interactions has been increasingly studied in recent years. At present, chains and wire ropes are widely used in offshore engineering practice. On the basis of mooring line statics, an explicit formulation of single mooring chain/wire rope stiffness coefficients and mooring stiffness matrix of the mooring system were derived in this article, taking into account the horizontal restoring force, vertical restoring force and their coupling terms. The nonlinearity of mooring stiffness was analyzed, and the influences of various parameters, such as material, displacement, pre-tension and water depth, were investigated. Finally some application cases of the mooring stiffness in hydrodynamic calculation were presented. Data shows that this kind of stiffness can reckon in linear and nonlinear forces of mooring system. Also, the stiffness can be used in hydrodynamic analysis to get the eieenfrequencv of slow drift motions.