• Journal of Ocean Engineering and Technology
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.89-95
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• 2009

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the safety under extreme environmental conditions and the dynamic safety under service environment conditions, of oceanographic buoy mooring systems consisting of a variety of materials, including chain, wire rope, nylon rope, and polypropylene rope. For the static safety assessment of a mooring system, after the calculation of external forces and the division of a mooring system into finite elements, the numerical integral was conducted to yield the elemental static tension until satisfying the geometrical convergence condition. To evaluate the dynamic safety, various processes were considered, including data collection about the anticipated areas for mooring, a determination of the parameters for the interpretation, the interpretation of the dynamic characteristics based on an analytic equation that takes into account the heave motion effect of a buoy hull and a mooring system, and a fatigue analysis of the linear cumulative damage. Based on the analysis results, a supplementary proposal for a wire rope that has a fracture in an actual mooring area was established.