Surge motion predictions of a moored tanker It appears that the mooring pattern of large ships at exposed jetties is always

rather similar, using an average of about 16 mooring lines of vari~ous materials and thicknesses. The natural period of vessel surge with this kind of mooring system usually ranges between 50 and 150 s. During storm conditions, wave groups having periods within this range frequently occur at exposed jetty locations. From a designer's standpoint, to assure the safety of ships and jetty structures and to reduce downtime when loading the ships, it may be useful to know the expected maximum surge motion of a moored ship. We calculated maximum surge excursions of the 240 000t tanker, idealised in Fig. 3, moored to an exposed jetty and subject to the action of long-crested natural seaways with waves propagating in the longitudinalship dire ction. We approximated wave conditions according to the PiersonMoscowitz spectrum ~ and specified the seastates by the significant wave height Hs, defined as the average of the one-third highest wave heights, and the average zero-upcrossing period T~, defined in terms of the zeroth and second spectral moments m0 and m2 as Tz ---- 2It(too~m2) 1/2. We considered seastates having significant wave heights of up to 5 m and selected the matching zero-upcrossing periods, ranging up to 11.6 s, that corresponded to swell wave conditions as recommended by the American Petroleum Institute. 45 We assumed the mooring system's overall restoring force characteristic in surge to be linear and chose five representative restoring force constants of 500, 700, 1000, 2000 and 4000 kN/m that correspond to natural surge periods of the moored ship of 148, 125, 105, 74 and 52 s, respectively. By considering only surge response and assuming that low-frequency surge can be decoupled from all other ship motions, the low-frequency surge equation can be written in linear form with constant coefficients. This enabled us to perform a frequency domain analysis using spectral expressions of wave drift force. We assumed that low-frequency surge response, XLF , is the solution of the motion equation (m + a)JCLF + b-~LF + CfXLF = fLF (1) where m and a represent, respectively, the tanker's mass and its hydrodynamic added mass in surge at low-frequency, b is the low-frequency damping coefficient in surge, C/ is the mooring system restoring force constant, and fLF is the low-frequency wave (drift) force for the tanker in head waves. We assumed a constant added mass in surge equal to 15% of ship mass and a damping coefficient equal to 1.2% of critical damping. The critical damping, be, being a function of the mooring restoring force coefficient, was obtained from bc = 2[(m + a)Cr] t/z (2) The natural surge period, Tn, was of course also a function of the mooring restoring force coefficients as given by T, = 2rc[(m + a)/Cf] j/2 (3) The response spectrum of low-frequency surge, SxLF (P), was determined from S~LF (P) = SrLF (#) X DRO 2(/2) (4) where SxLF (#) is the spectral density of the low-frequency wave drift force, DRO (p) is the amplitude of the low-frequency surge motion response function, and p is the circular wave frequency at low frequencies.