FPSO Mooring Line Integrity Supervising System Based on Motion Data and Natural Frequency Estimation

Abstract

Offshore production facilities play a central role in the oil industry given the growing demand for energy resources. The mooring system of these floating structures is a critical component for safety maintenance. The timely identification of mooring lines failures can prevent environmental pollution, property losses and further system failures. In this paper we propose a system to detect and classify failures of the mooring lines based on the natural period in the longitudinal axis and in the lateral axis of the long drift oscillatory motion of the platform. The proposal starts from the hypothesis that when a line break occurs, the natural period of oscillation of the platform is increased, and this difference may indicate the malfunction of the mooring system. The proof of concept developed for the proposed system demonstrates the potential of using the natural period to detect failures in mooring lines for floating vessels, validating the initial hypothesis that the difference in a natural period appears when a line breaks and that this difference may detect line break.