Design of anchoring systems through proability analysis

Other conference contribution, 1985

Until today, the capacity of a mooring system has been based on a traditional analysis with safety factors. A more prper way of determining the the mooring performance would be to calculate the probability of failure in the mooring system as a whole. The present paper gives a minute description of traditional versus probabilistic design methods, and as calculation examples the probability for cable collapse at loads lower than the catalogued strength is calculated for a chain and a wire cable. The presented ideas are a first steps of a project where the aim is to create practical damage functions from which a captain can decide when to change anchoring cables.