On the Assessment of Thruster Assisted Mooring Sue Wang American Bureau of Shipping Houston, Texas, USA

ABSTRACT Increasingly newly built semi-submersibles are being fitted with advanced mooring systems and some level of thrust capability for improved station keeping. The operation modes range from mooring only in relatively shallow water, thruster assisted mooring in deep water and Dynamic Positioning (DP) mode in ultra deep water conditions. In support of classification services for station keeping with thrust assisted mooring, a comparative study on the performance of mooring systems with and without thruster assistance has been carried out. Time-domain numerical simulations have been employed to assess the mooring load and station keeping capability. This paper presents the findings from the study in the interests of sharing information with industry. INTRODUCTION The station keeping system is one of the major components of a floating offshore unit. For a semi-submersible unit, the station keeping system can be a mooring system only, a DP with thrusters, or a DP assisted mooring system. A mooring system normally includes 8 or 12 mooring lines of chain or chain and wire, while a typical DP system uses 8 or 6 thrusters. DP assisted mooring has been used in the design of station keeping systems for MODUs and for FPSOs. The thrusters (or DP) are used for heading control and for reducing the mooring load. One of the principal reasons for using thruster assisted mooring is it can reduce overall project costs by reducing the mooring system in terms of either fewer mooring lines or a lighter overall system, especially for deepwater projects. Figure 1 depicts the station keeping cost for mooring and DP system as a function of water depth [1].

Figure 1 Cost Curve of Station Keeping For a DP assisted mooring system, the thrusters may only be active under relatively severe weather conditions such that therefore the operation and maintenance cost for the DP system could be relatively lower than that of a DP only operation. With exploration and production moving into increasingly greater water depths, thruster assisted mooring has become one of the alternative concepts for station keeping. However, thruster assisted mooring is a very complex station keeping system. The scope of the assessment of both the DP (thruster) system and the mooring system needs to be expanded to include the new failure modes for the DP system and the effectiveness of the thruster capacity on the overall mooring system. The load sharing between the thrusters and the mooring system may only be accounted for through model testing or time domain numerical simulation. This paper presents a simulation study of thruster assisted mooring for a generic semisubmersible unit. The semi-submersible is a drilling unit and is designed to operate in mooring mode in relatively shallow water of 300 meters, thruster assisted mooring in deepwater of less than 1000 meters, and DP in ultra deepwater of more than 1000 meters. The unit has two pontoons and four columns. The length of pontoons is 114.5 meters and the height of the pontoons is 10 meters. The displacement of the unit is 53718 tons at the

operational draft of 20.5 meters. The unit is equipped with a typical DP-2 class system [2] that has eight azimuth thrusters powered by four generators. Two mooring arrangements are used in the analysis: 8-mooring lines and 12 mooring lines. Each line includes three components: chain, rope and chain. Figure 2 illustrates the layout of the mooring lines and the thrusters.

Figure 2 Layout of Mooring Lines and Thrusters The station keeping analysis covers the mooring system only, the DP system only and the DP assisted mooring system. The analysis was carried out using the time domain simulation

program aNySIM developed by MARIN [3]. The results in terms of mooring load and DP capability are presented. The comparative evaluation of these station keeping systems is also presented. METHODOLOGY OF DP ASSISTED MOORING A DP system is a feedback control system. Figure 3 depicts a typical DP control loop. The inputs to the system are the measured and required positions. The system determines the required thruster power to keep the unit at the position required. The motions induced by the first order wave load are beyond the scope of the DP system, and Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) [6] is applied to filter out the first order component. The PID (Proportional-Integral-Derivative) control algorithm is to determine the needed power for the station keeping. The allocation algorithm makes the assignment for each thruster normally based on minimizing total required power. When DP is used in combination with the mooring system, mooring load effect on the vessel and the mooring stiffness for the selection of PID coefficients need to be considered. ENVIRONMENTAL LOAD The maximum design environmental conditions for mooring system for a drilling unit are 5-year and 10-year environments for operation away from other structures and operation in the vicinity

of other structures, respectively [4].

The environment for drilling operation is normally

determined by owners and, in general, a 1-year environment is applied.

Required position

Wind Feed Forward

EKF

PID

ALLOC

Measured Position

VESSEL

THRUST

Wind, Waves, Current

Mooring load

Figure 3 DP control Loop For a DP system, there is no regulatory requirement for the maximum design environmental condition. The operation environmental conditions are normally specified by owners. In general, similar environmental conditions to that of mooring system are applied in practice. Table 1 lists environmental conditions for a specific site. Table 1 Environmental Conditions Hs (m) Tp(s) 1 min wind (kts) Current (kts) 1-year return period 6.00 11.2 42.7 1.02 5-year return period 9.80 12.5 69.0 1.27 10-year return period 10.8 13.5 74.0 1.43

Wave loads of first order and second order drift are calculated from a three-dimensional seakeeping program. Wind and current forces are calculated using the formula below [5]:

F CV 2
Where C is the load coefficient that can be obtained from model test, V is wind or current velocity.

ANALYSIS RESULTS The main particulars of the semi-submersible and mooring system are given in Tables 2 and 3. The total length of the mooring line changes with the water depth to keep the pretension at 2000kN while the length of the chain part is kept the same as 1650m. There are eight thrusters for the DP system and each has maximum thrust of 750 kN. The analysis has been carried out for the mooring system, the DP system performance and for the DP assisted mooring system. Table 2 Main Particulars of Semi-submersible Displacement Pontoon Length Draft KG Kxx Kyy Wind frond area Wind side area 53718 tonne 114.5 m 20.5 m 24.5 m 35.1 m 35.1 m 3500 m2 3500 m2

Table 3 Mooring Line Characteristics Pre-tension Chain segments Chain diameter Chain length Mass in air Weight in water Stiffness Breaking strength Rope segment Rope diameter Mass in air Weight in water Stiffness Breaking strength Mooring system For a drilling unit, the following cases, cited in Table 4, need to be covered in an analysis for assessing mooring line strength. The damaged condition is defined, in general, as the maximum loaded mooring line is broken. Unit kN mm m kg kg kN kN mm kg kg kN kN mooring line 2000 84 1500+150 155 134 633000 8152 1600 4.2 4.1 235440 8280

Table 4 Analysis Cases for Mooring System Operation (1-year return period) Intact condition Damaged condition Survival (5 or 10-year return period) Intact condition Damaged condition

Mooring System

For the mooring arrangement given in Figure 2, the environment load from 45-deg, 135-deg, 225-deg and 315-deg could be among the worst case scenarios for mooring line load. This study focuses on a wind, wave and current co-linear environmental condition and the heading is 45 degrees. Two water depths of 300m and 1000m are included in the analysis. Tables 5 to 8 list maximum mooring line load, and the maximum offset for 12-line and for 8-line mooring systems, respectively. The 12-line mooring system, in general, meets the design requirement for mooring line strength and for the targeted offset limits. However, the 8-line mooring system does not meet the over all design requirements. Table 5 Maximum Mooring Line Load-12 Mooring Lines (kN) Water Depth (m) 300 1000 Condition Intact Damaged Intact Damaged 1-year Environment 3085 3820 2903 3474 5-year Environment 4395 5772 3787 4807

Table 6 Maximum Offset-12 Mooring Lines (m) Water Depth (m) 300 1000 Condition Intact Damaged Intact Damaged 1-year Environment 8.70 14.30 20.91 36.71 5-year Environment 17.90 26.14 42.60 64.47

Table 7 Maximum Mooring Line Load-8 Mooring Lines (kN) Water Depth (m) 300 1000 Condition Intact Damaged Intact Damaged 1-year Environment 3427 5136 3287 4599 5-year Environment 5384 Failed 4631 Failed

Table 8 Maximum Offset-8 Mooring Lines (m) Water Depth (m) 300 1000 Condition Intact Damaged Intact Damaged 1-year Environment 11.84 23.16 29.43 60.48 5-year Environment 24.56 Failed 60.22 Failed

DP Performance Similar to the mooring analysis, Table 9 lists the analysis cases for the selected DP system. For the semi-submersible used in this study, the DP capability is comparable among all headings (see Figure 4) when the thruster interaction effects are neglected. In reality, the DP capability is smaller in beam sea and close to beam sea conditions due to thruster-thruster interactions [7]. However, this study does not include the interaction effects and the simulation analysis focuses on 45-degree case. The water depth is 1000m. Table 9 Analysis Cases for DP System Operation (1-year return period) Intact condition Worst case failure Survival (5 or 10-year return period) Intact condition Worst case failure

DP system

The worst case failure for this design is one generator down, which could result in two thrusters being inoperable. For the 45 degree deading condition, damage to thrusters 1 and 6 is most critical condition. Thrusters 1 and 6 are diagonally located to each other.

Thrust usage 80% Current speed=1.03 m/s

Figure 4 DP Capability Plot

Table 10 provides the results for DP performance analysis. Figure 5 shows the time history of the offset and Figure 6 plots the time history for total used thrusts. Table 10 DP Performance Performance Offset (m) Condition Intact Damaged ST1 ST2 ST3 ST4 ST5 ST6 ST7 ST8 ST1 ST2 ST3 ST4 ST5 ST6 ST7 ST8 1-year Environment 39.47 39.12 473 473 478 479 467 466 469 470 0 584 579 579 599 0 618 623 5-year Environment 79.45 Drifted 750 750 750 750 750 750 750 750 0 750 750 750 750 0 750 750

Max Thrust Intact (kN)

Max Thrust Damaged (kN)

40 35

Offset (m)

30 25 20 1 5 1 0 1 0000 1 000 1 1 2000 1 3000 1 4000 1 5000 1 6000 1 7000 1 8000 1 9000 20000

tim e (s)

Figure 5 Time History of the Offset

Total Thrust (kN)

5.E+03 4.E+03 4.E+03 3.E+03 3.E+03 2.E+03 1 0000 1 000 1 1 2000 1 3000 1 4000 1 5000 1 6000 1 7000 1 8000 1 9000 20000

Tim e (s)

Figure 6 Time History of Used Total Thrust From Table 10, it indicates that the selected thrusters could not keep the position of the semisubmersible for the 5-year wave environmental condition. For the 1-year environmental

condition, thrusters 7 and 8 have used more than 80% of their maximum thrust at the damaged condition.

DP Assisted Mooring For DP assisted mooring, API recommends using the following definitions for intact and damaged conditions and hence to use factors of safety accordingly. Table 11 DP Assisted Mooring Case Definition DP Assisted mooring Intact Damaged (T) Damaged (M) Mooring system Intact Intact Damaged Thruster system Intact Damaged Intact

The DP assisted mooring analysis focuses on the 8-line mooring system that does not meet the design requirements. Similar to the mooring analysis, two environmental conditions are considered. Table 11 summarizes the maximum offsets for the analyzed cases.

Table 11 Maximum Offset-8 Mooring Lines (m) Water Depth (m) 300 Condition Intact Damaged (T) Damaged (M) Intact Damaged (T) Damaged (M) 1-year Environment 9.03 9.02 16.33 17.12 16.99 31.54 5-year Environment 17.28 17.01 27.08 33.69 33.25 47.43

1000

Mooring line load and utilized thrust are plotted in Figures 7 to 14. In the figures, ML stands for mooring line and TH stands for thruster.

50% Percentage of Breaking Strength 45% 40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% ML1 ML2 ML3 ML4 ML5 ML6 ML7 ML8 Mooring Line Intact Damage (Thrust) Damage (M Line)

Figure 7 Mooring Line Load (300m, 1-year environment)

40% 35%
Percentage of Maximum Thrust

Intact

Damage (Thrust)

Damage (M Line)

30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0% TH1 TH2 TH3 TH4

Thruster

TH5

TH6

TH7

TH8

Figure 8 Utilized Thrust (300m, 1-year environment)

70%
Percentage of Breaking Strength

60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

Intact Damage (Thrust) Damage (M Line)

ML1

ML2

ML3

ML4

ML5

ML6

ML7

ML8

Mooring Line

Figure 9 Mooring Line Load (300m, 5-year environment)

100% 90%
Percentage of Maximum Thrust

Intact

Damage (Thrust)

Damage (M Line)

80% 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% TH1 TH2 TH3 TH4
Thruster

TH5

TH6

TH7

TH8

Figure 10 Utilized Thrust (300m, 5-year environment)

45% 40%
Percentage of Breaking Strength

Intact Damage (Thrust) Damage (M Line)

35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

ML1

ML2

ML3

ML4

ML5

ML6

ML7

ML8

Mooring Line

Figure 11 Mooring Line Load (1000m, 1-year environment)

60% Intact
Percentage of Maximum Thrust

Damage (Thrust)

Damage (M Line)

50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0% TH1 TH2 TH3 TH4

Thruster

TH5

TH6

TH7

TH8

Figure 12 Utilized Thrust (1000m, 1-year environment)

50% 45%
Percentage of Breaking Strength

Intact Damage (Thrust) Damage (M Line)

40% 35% 30% 25% 20% 15% 10% 5% 0%

ML1

ML2

ML3

ML4

ML5

ML6

ML7

ML8

Mooring Line

Figure 13 Mooring Line Load (1000m, 5-year environment)

120% Intact
Percentage of Maximum Thrust

Damage (Thrust)

Damage (M Line)

100% 80% 60% 40% 20% 0% TH1 TH2 TH3 TH4

Thruster

TH5

TH6

TH7

TH8

Figure 14 Utilized Thrust (1000m, 5-year environment)

Table 11 and Figures 7 to 14, it indicates that by using of a combination of the 8-line mooring system with the DP system, the performance meets the over all requirements. However, the thruster and thruster interaction, thruster and hull interaction, and other factors are not included in the analysis, which could reduce the performance of the DP system. In general, the mooring line loads for water depths of 300 meters and 1000 meters are comparable. For 1000-meter water depth, an extra 1000-meter rope has been added to each mooring line that was used for the 300-meter water depth mooring. The usage of the thrust is related to the PID coefficients of the DP system. Higher thruster is required to keep a relatively small offset.

SUMMARY AND DISCUSSION Time domain simulations have been carried out for station keeping systems of three types: mooring system, DP system and DP assisted mooring system. Two water depths of 300m and 1000m are considered in the analysis. Two mooring arrangements: 12 mooring lines and 8 mooring lines are used for comparative study. The findings are summarized as following. Time Domain simulation provides transparency between the mooring load and utilized thrust.

For DP assisted mooring, the DP control algorithm needs to include the mooring effect on the motions of the units. The PID coefficients need to include the effect of mooring stiffness.

With the assistance of the thrusters, the twelve-line mooring system may be reduced to a lighter eight-line mooring system.

Time domain DP simulation includes slowly varying motion component. The results show that the dynamic component could be higher than 20% of the total steady component, which is normally considered as the margin in the steady state DP capability analysis. Therefore, a 20% margin for dynamic effect may not be conservative for certain conditions.

Although there are regulatory requirement for the factors of safety for mooring line load, there is no regulatory requirement for the maximum utilization of the thrust

Thruster efficiency due to interactions between thrusters, hull effect, current and others need to be further included in the analysis.

REFERENCE [1] Ryu, S., Hull/Mooring/Riser Coupled Motion Simulations of Thruster-Assisted Mooring Platforms, PhD Dissertation, Texas A&M University, 2003. [2] ABS, Vessel System and machinery, Rules for Building and Classing Steel Vessels, 2010. [3] MARIN, aNySIM-Pro, 2008. [4] API, Design and Analysis of Stationkeeping Systems for Floating Structures, RP 2SK, 2008. [5] ABS, Rules for Building and Classing Mobile Offshore Drilling Units, 2008. [6] Lewis, F.L., Applied Optimal Control & Estimation, Prentice Hall & Texas Instruments Digital Signal Processing Series, 1992. [7] Serraris, J.W., Validation of the DP module of aNySim, M.Sc. thesis, T.U. Delft, 2007