Experimental Study on Wear Coefficient of Mooring Chain for Floating Offshore Structures

Abstract

Floating wind turbine facilities installed in deep sea areas play an essential role in carbon dioxide emissions reduction.One of the problems associated with the commercialization of these facilities is the maintenance cost for mooring chains.Therefore,it is necessary to establish a quantitative wear evaluation method for mooring chains.Wear coefficient measured by wear tests is one of the essential physical parameters to evaluate the wear performance of metals.The pin-on-disk wear test is generally performed for obtaining wear coefficient.However, wear coefficient measured by this method had significant variation in our past study.Additionally, it has difficulty to use the heat-treated surface of the mooring chain under high pressure in fully immersed wet condition.To reproduce the actual situation,new wear test machine was designed and wear tests were implemented to validate the accuracy.As a result,it is confirmed that the proposed wear test method is possible to obtain the wear coefficient with significantly small variation compared with the conventional pin-on-disk wear test.