A Study on Mooring Systems of an Offshore Floating Platform for Different Configurations

Abstract. Moored systems of floating platforms typically have mooring lines in groups, attached to hull of the platform in different configurations. Study on the restoring behaviour of these systems for various parameters of mooring lines gives an insight to decide on the preliminary design of platforms. This paper includes parametric study on the behaviour of mooring systems for various symmetric, asymmetric configurations of the lines. To compute the restoring forces of the mooring system, quasi-static analysis has been adopted and a MATLAB code named QSAML has been developed, validated with experimental tests and used for the parametric study. It has been observed that, the restoring capability of mooring system reduces when the lines are placed away from the wave heading. For any wave heading, the variation in restoring behaviour of mooring system with symmetric configurations is insignificant up to relatively small excursions of the platform.