Low-cycle fatigue assessment of offshore mooring chains under service loading

The integrity of mooring chains is essential to the safety of a range of offshore platforms. However, mooring line failures are occurring earlier than their design lives, with a high number of these failures occurring due to fatigue. Early in the fatigue life of the component fatigue initiation processes occur, where the fatigue hotspot is sensitive to the mean load and there is plastic strain accumulation from the multiaxial stress-strain responses of the material, leading to cyclic plastic damage accumulation. The traditional SN approach suggested by mooring standards does not consider these effects, and it is proposed that this lack of consideration under low-cycle fatigue conditions is the reason for the current non-conservative fatigue assessments of mooring chains. This paper aims to develop a fatigue approach based on a critical plane multiaxial fatigue criterion for mooring chains that can consider the damage-induced by the cyclic plasticity and the mean load effect, to investigate the importance of incorporating low-cycle fatigue into the mooring chain life prediction. To develop the critical plane approach, the multiaxial stress-strain states are extracted for the critical plane at the fatigue hotspot from a finite element model of a mooring chain. This is then correlated with a fatigue life prediction provided by conventional fatigue design data. It uses a simulation of an FPSO as a case study to demonstrate the importance of low cycle fatigue, which shows that the mean load effect is significant in reducing the fatigue life for mooring chain applications, while the effect of fatigue damage-induced cyclic plasticity is limited. The fatigue damage accumulation predicted by the critical plane approach is significantly higher than that of the traditional SN approach and should be accounted for in mooring line design.

Automated summary

The integrity of mooring chains is crucial for offshore platform safety, but early fatigue failures are a significant concern. The fatigue initiation processes are sensitive to the mean load and involve plastic strain accumulation, highlighting the importance of considering low-cycle fatigue in mooring chain design.