Mooring Line Damping Estimation by a Simplified Dynamic Model

When predicting slowly varying resonant vessel motions, a realistic estimate of the motion damping is crucial. Mooring line damping, which is mainly induced by the drag force on line, can dominate the total damping of catenary moored systems and methods for predicting mooring line damping are therefore required. Based on a simplified dynamic model of mooring line tension, an approach to estimate the corresponding damping is presented in this paper. Short-term time domain simulations of dynamic line tension are carried out to verify the accuracy of the simplified frequency domain approach. Compared with the simulation results, the practical simplified method proposed herein gives a maximum 30% lower prediction of the damping coefficient of each mooring line and an about 20% smaller estimate of the total line damping and therefore yields conservative estimates of the low frequency vessel motions.