Wear performance of mooring chain in wet environment with substitute ocean water

Floating wind turbine facilities installed in deep sea areas play an essential role in the promotion of green energy. One of the problems associated with the commercialization of facilities installed in the deep sea is the maintenance cost of mooring chains, because they are expensive and wear between links leads to chain breakage. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a quantitative wear evaluation method for mooring chains. An experimental facility to reproduce the wear caused by sliding between links at the scale of an actual floating wind turbine was developed to investigate the wear performance in seawater conditions, and wear tests were conducted. Substitute ocean water was applied to the experiment instead of seawater. In addition, a procedure for nonlinear finite element analysis was improved to estimate the behaviour of wear between links. Measured stress versus strain relations of the links was considered in the finite element analysis. The experiments and numerical analysis confirmed that the amount of wear in the substitute ocean water was less than that obtained in dry air and that the tensile force between links is an important factor for the degree of wear between links.