Project description
Improved cable-soil interaction for mooring cables
Moorings of floating oil and gas (O&G) structures present surprisingly large failure rates. A top solution is a redundancy in the design. However, marine renewables cannot afford such redundancy in the mooring design to obtain a competitive levelised cost of energy (LCOE). The EU-funded ISLINGTON project will reduce uncertainties in the estimated fatigue damage of mooring cables due to soil-cable interaction in the touch-down zone (TDZ) and the economic cost for marine renewables. ISLINGTON will improve the numerical modelling of the cable-soil interaction in the TDZ for mooring cables, generate experimental data for mooring line trenching and perform a numerical investigation of the effect of trenching on the fatigue of mooring cables.
Objective
Moorings of floating oil and gas (O&G) structures exhibit surprisingly large failure rates. In the O&G industry this problem is simply handled by redundancy in the design. It is unlikely that marine renewables - in order to obtain a competitive levelised cost of energy (LCOE) can afford such redundancy in the mooring design. ISLINGTON has the overall objective to reduce uncertainties in estimated fatigue damage of mooring cables due to soil-cable interaction in the touch down zone (TDZ); and subsequently lower the economic cost of mooring systems for marine renewables. To achieve this objective, the following research actions will be carried out: 1) Improving the numerical modelling of the cable-soil interaction in the TDZ for mooring cables by allowing for time-dependent granular soil dynamics. This will be done by creating an Application Programming Interface (API) inside a granular particle soil solver to allow a two-way coupling to a mooring cable solver providing position and motion of the mooring cable. 2) Generating experimental data for mooring line trenching to be used for validation. This will be done by forced oscillations of a cable in a wave flume with sandy bottom and log the development of the trenching under different forcing. 3) Numerical investigation of the effect of trenching on fatigue of mooring cables. This will be done for standard test cases such as the IAE Task 30: OC3-OC6 test cases. The work proposed is well beyond state-of-art with respect to ground modelling of mooring cables in that the bathymetry will be time-dependent so trenching will be modelled together with the nonlinear cable response. The work on trenching effect to mooring line fatigue and snap load generation and dissipation will be the first such investigation. The resulting papers, models and experimental datasets will be released open-access in line with the open science practice.
Fields of science
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
9220 Aalborg
Denmark