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For reducing the maintenance cost of floating offshore wind turbine structures, it is necessary to establish a quantitative wear estimation method for the mooring chains. In this paper, attempts have been made to improve the accuracy of the estimation method in terms of the mooring chain model. These investigations were performed about a spar-type floater moored with three catenary mooring lines at Goto, Nagasaki prefecture, Japan. Up to now, the mass-spring model had been used for the mooring chain in response analysis and the relative angle between two spring lines was considered as only a sliding angle without friction. However, there is also rolling in the motion between mooring links, which should cause less wear than by sliding. In this study, the detailed motion of the link in response analysis is calculated and applied to the wear estimation by using a 3-D model in MSC. Adams. This enables the wear estimation considering link motion closer to a real phenomenon. A Contact analysis between the 3-D chain model requires some contact properties (e.g. contact stiffness and friction). In this paper, these properties are calculated based on the Hertzian contact method and FEM analysis. As a result, the wear amounts overestimated by using the mass-spring model in the previous investigation, especially at the point located clump weight and touchdown point, decrease getting closer to the measurements. In addition, by tracking the contact points it is found that the major motion caused between links is the rolling. For future works, there remains a need for further validation and the consideration of elasticity between mooring links, impressions caused by proof load test and the effect of corrosion.

For the development of floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) in Japan, reliability assessment and cost reduction by efficient maintenance on mooring chains are part of the key issues because sites deeper than 60 m require mooring systems for station keeping. In this paper, attempts have been made to simplify the wear estimation method which was previously proposed by using a 3-D rigid-body link model for improvement of accuracy. These investigations are performed about a spar-type floating structure moored with three catenary lines at Goto, Nagasaki prefecture, Japan. In the previous study, it was confirmed that the estimation method using the 3-D link model can calculate the interlink wear amount closer to the chain diameter measurements and more reasonable than the method using the conventional mass-spring model by removing the rolling distance from the displacement of contact points. However, the estimation method has technical difficulty in terms of calculation of contact properties and analysis costs for the mooring chain design. For this reason, the wear estimation method is simplified and verified by considering the rolling motion between mooring chain links modeled by the widely employed mass-spring model based on the method proposed by Mooring Integrity JIP. Firstly, the wear due to the rolling is reproduced by a three-dimensional FE analysis to investigate the actual wear phenomenon including the effect of the proof load test as well as the idealized configuration. Secondly, the application method is proposed against the response of the mooring chain subjected to irregular waves Finally, a comparison with the measurement is conducted to verify the proposed wear estimation method.