Investigation on optimization design of equivalent water depth truncated mooring system

The oil industry is now increasingly concentrating their efforts and activities in connection with developing fields in deeper waters, ranging typically from 500 m to 3000 m worldwide. However, the modeling of a full-depth system has become difficult presently; no tank facility is sufficiently large to perform the testing of a complete FPS with compliant mooring in 1000 m to 3000 m depth, within reasonable limits of model scale. Until recently, the most feasible procedure to meet this challenge seems to be the so-called “hybrid model testing technique”. To implement this technique, the first and important step is to design the equivalent water depth truncated mooring system. In this work, the optimization design of the equivalent water depth truncated mooring system in hybrid model testing for deep sea platforms is investigated. During the research, the similarity of static characteristics between the truncated and full depth system is mainly considered. The optimization mathematical model for the equivalent water depth truncated system design is set up by using the similarity in numerical value of the static characteristics between the truncated system and the full depth one as the objective function. The dynamic characteristic difference between the truncated and full depth mooring system can be minished by selecting proper design rule. To calculate the static characteristics of the mooring system, the fourth order Runge-Kutta method is used to solve the static equilibrium equation of the single mooring line. After the static characteristic of the single mooring line is calculated, the static characteristic of the whole mooring system is calculated with Lagrange numerical interpolation method. The mooring line material database is established and the standard material name and the diameter of the mooring line are selected as the primary key. The improved simulated annealing algorithm for continual & discrete variables and the improved complex algorithm for discrete variables are employed to perform the optimization calculation. The C++ programming language is used to develop the computer program according to the object-oriented programming idea. To perform the optimization calculation with the two algorithms mentioned above respectively and the better result is selected as the final one. To examine the developed program, an example of equivalent water depth truncated mooring system optimum design calculation on a 100,000-t, turret mooring FPSO in water depth of 320 m are performed to obtain the conformation parameters of the truncated mooring system, in which the truncated water depth is 160 m. The model test under some typical environment conditions are performed for both the truncated and the full depth system with model scale factor λ=80. After comparing the corresponding results from the test of the truncated system with those from the full depth system test, it’s found that the truncated mooring system design in this work is successful. Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 10602055 and 40776007) and the Natural Science Foundation of China Jiliang University (Grant No. XZ0501)