A Study on the Effectiveness of the Heading Control on the Mooring Line Tension and Position Offset for an Arctic Floating Structure under Complex Environmental Loads

Abstract

Even though interest in developing the Arctic region is increasing continuously, the standard procedure to be used to analyze the station-keeping performance of a floater considering ice loads has not been established yet. In this paper, the effectiveness of heading control with a dynamic positioning system is analyzed to evaluate the improvement of the performance of the station-keeping system in the ice conditions. Complex environmental loads with ice-induced forces were generated and applied to a ship type floater with dynamic positioning and mooring systems. Three-hour time-domain simulations were conducted for the two different station-keeping systems with mooring only and mooring with a dynamic positioning system. Position offsets and mooring line tensions for the two scenarios were compared with maximum values and most probable maxima (MPM) values. The results of the simulation showed that the heading control can reduce 8.2% of MPM values for the mooring lines and improve the station-keeping performance by about 16.3%. The validity of the station-keeping system that was designed was confirmed, and it is expected that the specification of mooring lines can be relaxed with the heading control.