Influence of Regular Wave and Ship Characteristics on Mooring Force Prediction by Data-Driven Model

The study of mooring forces is an important issue in marine engineering and offshore structures.Although being widely applied in mooring system,numerical simulations suffer from difficulties in their multivariate and nonlinear modeling.Data-driven model is employed in this paper to predict the mooring forces in different lines,which is a new attempt to study the mooring forces.The height and period of regular wave,length of berth,ship load,draft and rolling period are considered as potential influencing factors.Input variables are determined using mutual information(MI)and principal component analysis(PCA),and imported to an artificial neural network(NN)model for prediction.With study case of 200 and 300 thousand tons ships experimental data obtained in Dalian University of Technology,MI is found to be more appropriate to provide effective input variables than PCA.Although the three factors regarding ship characteristics are highly correlated,it is recommended to input all of them to the NN model.The accuracy of predicting aft spring line force attains as high as 91.2%.The present paper demonstrates the feasibility of MI-NN model in mapping the mooring forces and their influencing factors.

Prediction of the Mooring Force of a 2-D Floating Oil Storage Tank

A Constrained Interpolation Profile （CIP）-based model is developed to predict the mooring force of a two-dimensional floating oil storage tank under wave conditions, which is validated against to a newly performed experiment. In the experiment, a box-shaped floating oil storage apparatus is used. Computations are performed by an improved CIP-based Cartesian grid model, in which the THINC/SW scheme （THINC： tangent of hyperbola for interface capturing; SW： Slope Weighting）, is used for interface capturing. A multiphase flow solver is adopted to treat the water-air-body interactions. The Immersed Boundary Method （IBM） is implemented to treat the body surface. Main attention is paid to the sum force of mooring line and velocity field around the body. It is found that the sum force of the mooring line increases with increasing wave amplitude. The body suffers from water wave impact and large body motions occur near the free surface. The vortex occurs near the sharp edge, i.e., the sharp bottom comers of the float- ing oil storage tank and the vortex shedding can be captured by the present numerical model. The present model could be further improved by including turbulence model which is currently under development. Comparison between the computational mooring forces and the measured mooring forces is presented with a reasonable agreement. The developed numerical model can predict the mooring line forces very well.

Experimental Study of Mooring Type Effect on the Hydrodynamic Characteristics of VLFS

Mooring system is a significant part of very large offshore floating structures(VLFS).In this paper,a single module pontoon type VLFS model considering four mooring types is studied through physical model tests to determine the effects of mooring conditions on the hydroelastic response,mooring force,incident coefficient,reflection coefficient and energy dissipation coefficient.Eight mooring cables are symmetrically arranged on both sides of the model.The floating body model satisfies the similarity of stiffness and gravity,while the cable satisfies the similarity of elasticity and gravity.The results show that the effect of mooring type on mooring force is greater than that on hydroelastic response.Increasing the initial tension of the mooring cable will reduce the amplitude of the leeward of the VLFS model.The mooring angle of the mooring cable will affect the maximum mooring force and the initial tension of the mooring line will affect the wave period in which the maximum mooring force occurs.The transmission coefficient and wave energy dissipation coefficient will change regularly with different mooring types.These results may provide a reference to facilitate the mooring design of VLFS.

Study on Mooring Design and Calculation Method of Ocean Farm Based on Time-Domain Potential Flow Theory

In order to calculate the mooring force of a new semi-submerged Ocean Farm quickly and accurately,based on the unsteady time-domain potential flow theory and combined the catenary model,the control equation of mooring cable is established,and the mooring force of the platform under the wave spectrum is calculated.First of all,based on the actual situation of the ocean environment and platform,the mooring design of the platform is carried out,and the failure analysis and sensitivity analysis of the single anchor chain by the time domain coupling method are adopted:including different water depth,cycle,pretension size,anchor chain layout direction and wind speed,etc.The analysis results confirm the reliability of anchoring method.Based on this,the mooring point location of the platform is determined,the force of each anchor chain in the anchoring process is calculated,and the mooring force and the number of mooring cables are obtained for each cable that satisfies the specification,the results of this paper can provide theoretical calculation methods for mooring setting and mooring force calculation of similar offshore platforms.

New Method for Predicting the Motion Responses of A Flexible Joint Multi-Body Floating System to Irregular Waves

A new hybrid method of frequency domain and time domain is developed in this paper to predict the motion responses of a flexibly joint multi-body floating system to irregular waves. The main idea of the method is that the three-dimensional frequency method is used to obtain the hydrodynamic coefficients and the response equations are solved in time domain step by step. All the forces can be obtained at the same time. The motions and nonlinear mooring forces of a box type six-body floating system are predicted. A comparison of the theoretical method-based Solutions with experimental results has shown good agreement.

Experimental Research on A New Type of Floating Breakwater for Wave-Absorbing and Energy-Capturing

To avoid the damage caused by big wind and wave in cage culture, and to solve the problem of energy supply faced by automatic breeding equipment, a new type of floating breakwater, named as Savonius double buoy breakwater(SDBB), is proposed in the paper. The floating breakwater is composed of HDPE cylindrical double buoys and horizontal axis Savonius rotors, and has the functions of wave-absorbing and energy-capturing. Based on the linear wave theory and energy conservation law, the Fourier Transform was applied to separate the two-dimensional wave frequency domain, and the energy captured by the rotors and absorbed by the floating breakwater were calculated.Experiments were conducted in a two-dimensional wave-making flume, and the transmitted waves at different wave heights and periods, the tension of mooring lines, and the rotational torque exerted on the Savonius rotor were measured. A series of performance comparison tests were also performed on the new floating breakwater and the traditional double-floating breakwater. Results show that the new floating breakwater is better than the traditional one in terms of reducing wave transmittance, and the combination of the floating breakwater with Savonius rotors can provide for marine aquaculture equipments with green power supply to a certain degree of self-sufficiency.

Time-domain hydrodynamic analysis of pontoon-plate floating breakwater

The hydrodynamic behaviors of a floating breakwater consisting of a rectangular pontoon and horizontal plates are studied theoretically. The fluid motion is idealized as two-dimensional linear potential flow. The motions of the floating breakwater are assumed to be two-dimensional in sway, heave, and roll. The solution to the fluid motion is derived by transforming the governing differential equation into the integral equation on the boundary in time domain with the Green＇s function method. The motion equations of the floating breakwater are established and solved with the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method to obtain the displacement and velocity of the breakwater. The mooring forces are computed with the static method. The computational results of the wave transmission coefficient, the motion responses, and the mooring forces of the pontoon-plate floating breakwater are given. It is indicated that the relative width of the pontoon is an important factor influencing the wave transmission coefficient of the floating breakwater. The transmission coefficient decreases obviously as the relative width of the pontoon increases. The horizontal plates help to reduce the wave transmission over the floating breakwater. The motion responses and the mooring forces of the pontoon-plate floating breakwater are less than those of the pontoon floating breakwater. The mooring force at the offshore side is larger than that at the onshore side.

Dynamic Analysis for the Global Performance of An SPM-Feeder-Cage System Under Waves and Currents

In the present study, the dynamic response of a coupled SPM-feeder-cage system under irregular waves and shear currents is analyzed. A numerical model is developed by using the commercial software Orca Flex. Hydrodynamics coefficients of the vessel are calculated by using a 3D diffraction/radiation panel program. First- and second-order wave forces are included in the calculations. Morison equation is used to compute the drag force on line elements representing the net. Drag coefficients are determined at every time step in the simulation considering the relative normal velocity between the structural elements and the fluid flow. The dynamic response of the coupled system is analyzed for various environments and net materials. The results of the study show the effects of solidity ratio of the net and vertical positions of the cage on the overall dynamic response of the system, confirming the viability of this type of configuration for future development of offshore aquaculture in deep waters.

Hydrodynamic Performance of Air-Filled Wave Attenuator for Wave Control:Experimental Study

Numerous types of floating breakwaters have been proposed,tested and commercialized in the past decades.The majority of these breakwaters are made of solid bodies;hence,they are relatively bulky and are not readily to be rapidly installed at the targeted sites when immediate wave protection of the coastal and offshore facilities is needed.Furthermore,the application of these hard floating structures at the recreational beaches is rather unlikely due to potential deadly marine traffic collision.To overcome these problems,a flexible air-filled wave attenuator(AFWA)has been developed in the present study.This floating breakwater is made of flexible waterproof membrane materials.The main body consists of a rectangular air-filled prism and is ballasted by sandbags located around the floating module.The objective of this study is to evaluate the wave transmission,wave reflection,energy dissipation,motion responses and mooring forces of the AFWA under the random wave actions using physical modelling.The test model located in a 20 m long wave flume was subjected to a range of wave heights and periods.The wave profiles in the vicinity of the test model were measured using wave probes for determination of wave transmission,reflection and energy loss coefficients.The motion responses in terms of heave,surge and pitch,and wave forces acting on the mooring lines were measured using a motion tracking system and load cells,respectively.The experimental results reveal that the AFWA is effective in attenuating up to 95%in the incoming wave height and has low-wave-reflection properties,which is commendable for floating breakwaters.