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.

Data-based model free hysteresis identification for a nonlinear structure

In the last two decades, the damage detection for civil engineering structures has been widely treated as a modal analysis problem and most of the currently available vibration-based system identification approaches are based on modal parameters, namely the natural frequencies, mode shapes and damping ratios, and/or their derivations, which are suitable for linear systems. Nonlinearity is generic in engineering structures. For example, the initiation and development of cracks in civil engineering structures as typical structural damages are nonlinear process. One of the major challenges in damage detection, early warning and damage prognosis is to obtain reasonably accurate identification of nonlinear performance such as hysteresis which is the direct indicator of damage initiation and development under dynamic excitations. In this study, a general data-based identification approach for hysteretic performance in form of nonlinear restoring force using structural dynamic responses and complete and incomplete excitation measurement time series was proposed and validated with a 4-story frame structure equipped with smart devices of magneto-theological （MR） damper to simulate nonlinear performance. Firstly, as an optimization method, the least-squares technique was employed to identify the system matrices of an equivalent linear system of the nonlinear structure model basing on the exci- tation force and the corresponding vibration measurements with impact test when complete and incomplete excitations; and secondly, the nonlinear restoring force of the structure was identified and compared with the test measurements fi- nally. Results show that the proposed data-based approach is capable of identifying the nonlinear behavior of engineering structures and can be employed to evaluate the damage initiation and development of different structure under dynamic loads.