Publication Date

10-1987

GSO Technical Report Number

87-7

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Abstract

A computer program for the static analysis of a current meter mooring has been developed to help oceanographers design high performance mooring systems with Gulf Stream applications particularly in mind.


The special features of the analysis are:
1. Mooring components characteristics and current profiles are input parameters which can be modified by the user easily.
2. During the launch while the anchor pulls the mooring to the bottom, the transient tensions on each mooring component and their maximum sink rates are estimated; this analysis is done with and without a parachute attached to the anchor to slow the descent and reduce tensions.
3. The equilibrium performance with the anchor resting on the sea floor is computed to list the working tensions, tilt angles and depths for each mooring component. The component depth estimates account for the tilt, the elastic stretch of the line under working tension, and permanent stretch of the line under launch tensions, and hence this analysis is also done for the parachute and no-parachute cases.
4. Warnings are printed if the buoyancy is not distributed in such a way that, even if any line element were to break in the mooring, all parts above the release would nevertheless float to the sea surface.
5. Cost analysis of the mooring design is included.
6. The program displays the total horizontal drag felt by the anchor, to test whether it would drag.


This report specifically documents current meter mooring design for moorings launched November 1986 in the Gulf stream off Cape Hatteras in a SYNOP (Synoptic Ocean Prediction} Pilot Experiment. It describes in detail how to evaluate the computer program solution.

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