Material selection for hawsers for a side-by-side offloading system

In order to provide a theoretical guide for choosing the material for the hawsers for the FPSO side-by-side offloading system, which is moored by the yoke system, the 3D potential flow theory and full coupled time-domain analysis are presented to study the dynamic response of the offloading system. The MingZhu FPSO offloading system in the field BZ25-1 is simulated here; and four different characteristic fiber ropes are used as the material for the hawsers. To acquire an accurate hawser line tension, the polynomial fitting method is used to calculate the nonlinear stiffness of the hawsers. By comparing the hawser lines’ tension and the relative motion between the FPSO and the shuttle tanker, a suitable material for the hawser lines is chosen and discussed in this paper. The results indicate that the nonlinear stiffness characteristic of the fiber rope has a small effect on the relative motion of the vessels, but the hawser lines’ tension is greatly influenced by the different characteristics of the fiber ropes. The hawser lines’ tension with nonlinear stiffness is in accordance with the one with the upper and lower bound linear stiffness, which proves this method of fitting the fiber ropes’ nonlinear stiffness is reasonable and reliable.