Effect of Tensile Force for Wear Performance of Mooring Chain

Abstract

Floating wind turbine facilities, which are installed in the deep sea area, plays an essential role to promote the green energy application. One of the problems associated with the commercialization of facilities installed in the deep sea is the reduction of the maintenance cost of mooring chain, because breaking of the mooring chain caused by the wear between links leads to enormous economic losses. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a quantitative wear evaluation method for mooring chains. Experimental facility to reproduce the wear caused by sliding between links in actual scale applied for floating wind turbine, which had been proposed by the authors, was updated and the wear tests was conducted by setting some tensile force conditions between the links. Besides, procedure of the nonlinear finite element analysis was improved to estimate the behaviour of wearing between links. From experiments and numerical analysis, it has been confirmed that the tensile force between links is an important factor of the wear amount between links.

Wear Performance of Mooring Chain in Wet Environment With Substitute Ocean Water

“…An experimental facility was proposed [4] and improved [5] to reproduce inter-link wear induced by the motion of the mooring chain. In this study, the experimental facility was modified to study inter-link sliding wear under a wet environment.…”

“…We previously proposed an experimental facility and numerical nonlinear finite element procedure to reproduce the inter-link wear at actual scale [4] [5]. However, our reported experimental and numerical results were under atmospheric conditions.…”