Mooring is a procedure or system to anchor the ship to a fixed or floating asset and keep it connected during loading/ unloading operations or during station keeping. Safe mooring must withstand several forces, such as wind, the current, the tide and waves.

Type of mooring solution deployed is determined through a mooring analysis. Mooring analysis computes static and dynamic environmental loads, corresponding displacements and motions of the vessel and static and dynamic mooring tensions.

The static analysis often known as the quasi-static analysis is an easy and convenient tool to determine the maximum tensions of mooring lines of floating structure in wind and waves. Hence, it is frequently used in the initial stage of design of mooring systems and dynamic analysis is used only for limited and special cases. However it is difficult to estimate the dynamic effects of mooring lines and low frequency motions due to wind and waves using static analysis.

Accordingly, Dynamic analysis/simulations of moored floating vessels in wind, wave and current are conducted in various conditions of sea states, mooring coefficients and vessels. The numerical results are shown in figures for the sake of explaining the effects of various kinds of external forces on the maximum and mean displacements of vessels which corresponds to the tensions of mooring lines.

Kensa Marine engages mooring experts with decades of experience to perform mooring analysis studies for clients. Our experts are familiar with mooring analysis software suites including Optimoor, Sesam and Orcaflex.