2015

PROJECT REPORT ON:

NON-LINEAR RESTORING
FORCES OF AN OFFSHORE
PLATFORM

SUBMITTED TO: Xiaochuan(Vincent) Yu, Ph.D

AHMED NAZRUL ISLAM

MOHAMMAD QASEM ABUGHAZLEH

DEPERTMENT OF NAVAL ARCHITECTURE AND MARINE ENGINEERING | UNIVERSITY OF NEW ORLEANS

Objective: The topic chosen for the project has a great deal of
relevance in the offshore engineering field. Engineers need to
find out the proper design approach towards the nonlinear
forces and the way to simulate the motion due to hydrostatic
and mooring forces. The author represented a very simple
methodology to calculate the restoring forces of platforms
while taking into account of the hydrostatic restoring forces
and moments.
Introduction: In order to simulate the response of a platform it is essential to know what
are the forces acting on the platform. In order to discuss the equations of motions, the author
considered the platform to be in an equilibrium position. The main component of the forces are
considered to be the buoyancy force and mooring forces. The forces of the buoyancy forces is
resulted from the change in the volumetric displacement due to the hull geometry.
Theory: For any floating structure, the hydrostatic restoring forces can be resulted from
translational and rotational displacement. According to Ship Basic Theory by Rawson and
Tupper, the disturbance to the state of equilibrium can be described as three components of
translation and three components of rotation. Important to note that, the conventional axes is
defined based on the following consideration:

Translation in the X and Y axes does not produce any restoring or any resultant force. Thus once
displaced from the equilibrium position, any geometry whether be a ship or a platform, in X or Y
direction is in neutral equilibrium. The same does not apply for the X axis movement. For any
floating body, translation along the Z direction results in an augmented buoyancy force.

Rotation about the x-axis produces heel, y-axis which is trim and z-axis yaw may produce unstable
equilibrium. Thus all the non-restoring rotational or translational forces and moments need to
be calculated in order to mitigate the instability, and maintain desired position.
Considering the mooring forces, the weight of the cable can generate significant amount of the
forcing component affecting the total restoring forces. Thus in the forces discussed by the author,
mooring stiffness has been taken into considerations.
For a given spring it is known that
Fspring = kx,
where,
k=stiffness of the spring
x= displacement due to the forcing on the spring
Similarly we can write the mooring line exhibit the characteristics like a spring. In that case it
gives us,
Fmooring line = KjkCj,
where,
Kjk is mooring stiffness coefficient
Cj is displacement due to the forcing on the spring
j and k represents the direction in six degrees of freedom
Let us figure the surge and sway on a platform that essentially looks like a barge as the most
simplistic model.

In order to restrain the model, the mooring forces can be calculated using the equation:

=
=1

Now, considering the hydrostatics forces the author describes the following equations:
Rjk (X) = () = = 2

Rjk (X) = () () = = 4
Rjk (X) = () () = = 6
where,

is the density of the water

g is the gravitation constant
Awp is the total waterplane area
is the instantaneous displacement at time t
() is the transverse righting lever
() is the longitudinal righting lever

No considering the roll and pitch, we can use the

Mjk (X) = () () , = = 6

Mjk (X) = () () , = = 6

The Surge and Sway forces can also be deduced based on the relative position given with
respect to = + + . The Surge and Sway forcing is given as
=

()

()

The yaw moment can be deduced by writing the

=
=

Conclusion: The authors also described ways to implement the theories in program called ROSTP
and a subroutine INT. The functional approach (flow diagram) has been also provided by the
authors. Nevertheless the theory and application of the methodology presented in this paper is
highly effective in calculating the non-restoring forces on a platform. The methods are indeed
concise, and was easy to use to simulate the time-domain motion response.

Additional Question: For the purpose of the question what happens when the center point G
shifts? We can visually represent it as:

.The linear restoring moment for Yaw changes when the center point G,
2 = ( + 25)2 + ( + 20)2

= ( + 25)2 + ( + 20)2

Taking the new righting arm, we can thus calculate,

=
=1

= (( + 25)2 + ( + 20)2 )
=1

If initially (x,zi) =(0,0), we can find that, the change in Rnew is 32.016

Reading the values from the mooring force characteristics of the published data it is evident
that the Force due to the shift in G is approximately 0.32 Kg.