Profile and Frictional Capacity of a Mooring Line Embedded in Sand via Centrifuge Model Testing

The authors present a method for calculating a mooring line's tension and angle of inclination at the anchor pad eye to analyze the behavior of a mooring line embedded in sand. They adopted the governing equation from a previous study for clay and reanalyzed the frictional and bearing resistances. The authors performed a number of centrifuge tests at two anchor depths while maintaining relative densities of 76 or 51% in the cylindrical test box to validate the proposed analytical method. The analytical solutions agreed well with the test results and the results of the simplified method. The authors conducted a parametric study to evaluate the effects of various factors on the behavior of an embedded mooring line in sand, including the depth of the attachment point, the internal friction angle of sand, the submerged unit weight of sand, the angle of the mooring line on the seabed, and the self-weight and nominal diameter of the mooring line. The results demonstrated that the proposed analytical method is effective for analyzing the behavior of a mooring line embedded in sand. (C) 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.