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The characteristics of waves, winds and currents in a tropical cyclone environment differ significantly from those in a winter storm environment, like the North Sea. This can have a significant effect on the reliability of a mooring system that is designed to satisfy 100yr conditions with specified Factors of Safety in accordance with ISO19901-7 or API RP 2SK. This paper presents reliability analysis of the mooring system of a permanently connected Floating LNG vessel, placed at two locations: (a) a tropical cyclone environment of the North West Shelf of Australia and (b) a winter storm environment of the North Sea. It is demonstrated that as a result of differences in the long term distribution of environmental parameters (waves, winds) between a North Sea environment and a tropical cyclone environment, the long term distribution of the mooring line response differs significantly in these two locations. This paper shows that a mooring system which is designed in accordance with ISO (or API), in these two environments, will achieve very different reliability levels because of the significant differences in environmental characteristics. In order to achieve the same reliability for the mooring system at these two geographical locations, Factors of Safety for use with 100yr environmental conditions (Ultimate Limit State) were derived to achieve the same target probability of failure of 10-4 /annum. It was found that for the North Sea environment, a factor of 1.5 is required for both the mooring chain and the pile, while for the tropical cyclone environment the required Factor of Safety has to be increased to 2.1. These differences are very significant and design standards need to be revised to reflect these findings.

A key aspect in the design of a mooring system for a floating production unit is the estimation of the extreme mooring line loads for a specified short-term sea state of typical duration equal to 3 hours. Commonly used design approaches today are based on time-domain simulations whereby each 3 hour sea state is run a number of times (typically 10–30 times) to represent the randomness of the sea. A maximum response is recorded from each simulation. Particular statistic of the maxima data (e.g. mean, most probable maximum or a percentile) is used to represent the extreme mooring load for which the lines are designed. This paper studies and assesses the accuracy of obtaining design value from a population of maxima with reference to the mooring line load of a large ship-shaped floating production vessel. A coupled model, including all mooring lines and risers, has been developed, validated and used to generate responses for 100yr extreme condition and 10,000yr survival condition. To establish an accurate benchmark against which the results are compared, the time-domain analyses (duration 3 hours) are repeated 170 times, for each sea state, to represent different random realisations of each environment. It is examined how the accuracy of predicting the design mooring line load, from a sample of response maxima, improves as the number of simulations is increased progressively from 10 through to 170. The assessment is performed across different statistics of maxima that are usually chosen to represent the design response. Besides the mooring line load, other response parameters such as heave and turret excursion, are examined in this paper. The paper examines whether the severity of the response (100yr vs 10,000yr storm) or the response variable affect the number of maxima required to achieve statistical stability. The results indicate fitting a Gumbel distribution to the maxima from about 30–40 simulations can yield results that are statistically stable and accurate and are recommended as preferred methods of estimating the design response.

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