Wear Performance of the Mooring Chain Used in Floating Wind Turbines

To produce offshore wind power generation plants, deep-sea floating wind turbine facilities are required. Commercial installation of floating wind turbine facilities requires a reduction of the mooring cost. Mooring chain breaks due to progressive wear will lead to enormous damages. Therefore, a quantitative wear evaluation method for mooring chains needs to be established. In this study, an experimental setup was constructed to reproduce the wearing phenomenon in mooring chains due to the motion of the floating body induced by waves, and its usefulness was confirmed. The result of the wear test conducted in this study suggests that the tensile force between links affects the degree of wear. Additionally, numerical simulations were performed using a finite element model with measured wear characteristics of the link material to reproduce the phenomenon of wear between links and confirmed that the wear phenomenon could be represented by numerical simulation.