Fatigue life prediction method of fairleads installed on a FPSO
Paper in proceeding, 2017

As the key devices in the mooring system of a Floating Production Storage and Offloading vessel (FPSO), fairleads are used to guide the cables (wire rope or chain) from the vessel towards the anchor and help to change the vessel’s floating condition in a smooth manner. The fatigue strength of fairleads cannot be neglect-ed because the FPSO always suffers from complicated environmental loadings due to wave, current and wind; and induces highly varied loadings in the fairleads. In this paper, fatigue strength analysis is carried out for the fairleads of a FPSO served in the South Sea in China. Hydrodynamic performance of the FPSO cou-pling with its mooring system is firstly obtained, and then the short-term history of cable tension can be ob-tained by wave scatter diagram. The cable tension is regarded as the dynamic loading acted on the fairleads; and the corresponding history of stress range in the fairleads can be obtained by finite element analysis (FEA). At last, fatigue accumulating damage in the fairleads is calculated based on the rain-flow counting method and S-N curves. The estimation framework based on the ship motion and mooring tension coupling analysis in time domain proposed in this work can provide a fast fatigue life prediction of the fairleads when the ship is operated in different conditions.

Author

Jingxia Yue

Wuhan University of Technology

Pengfei Chen

Wuhan University of Technology

Yuliang Liu

University of Tokyo

Wengang Mao

Chalmers, Shipping and Marine Technology, Marine Technology

Maritime Transportation and Harvesting of Sea Resources

Vol. 1 679-687
978-081537993-5 (ISBN)

17th International Congress of the International Maritime Association of the Mediterranean, IMAM 2017
Lissabon, Portugal,

Subject Categories

Mechanical Engineering

Reliability and Maintenance

Marine Engineering

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Areas of Advance

Transport

Roots

Basic sciences

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Latest update

11/2/2022