Abstract
One point mooring systems have generally been used for maritime floating structures like ship mooring buoys, navigation signal buoys and etc. These mooring systems are effective on loading and unloading of the vessels. However the mooring systems have frequently damaged by storm waves. A main cause of the damage is the breakage of mooring chain due to impulsive tension, which is produced by large buoy motion. Therefore, the reduction of the impulsive tension is significant to protect the breakage of the mooring chain. The authors has suggest that Elastic Chain is effective on the reduction of impulsive tension. However, Elastic Chain is much more expensive than the steel chain. It is better to shorten the length of the Elastic Chain as possible as the impulsive tension sustains the value smaller than the allowable one. We have developed numerical simulation model for estimation of impulsive tension. And, we present an optimization procedure to minimize the cost of mooring line with Elastic Chain. The cost of the mooring line is about 50% to the case of using only steel chain that can be applied for impulsive tension.
