A Study on the Evaluation of Mooring Safety of LNG Ships
The ship’s safe mooring stability is a principles for the safe cargo handling works at the mooring berth. Today numerous standards, guidelines and recommendations concerning mooring practices, fittings and equipments exist throughout the worldwide maritime industries. In recently, the mooring facilities were constructed as dolphin types at the open sea area apart far from shoreside instead of enclosed coastline area in accordance with increasing ship’s size and for preventing environmental pollution. Therefore the exciting wave condition must be considered as a basic environmental criteria with the wind force and current force for all of the mooring ships at the sea berth facilities. In this study, this added wave force as one of the environmental external forces by using the theoretical formula was applied to the LNG ship in Pyeongtaeg harbor needed the special mooring stability of the sea berth. Through this research, it can be confirmed that wave force is the very important factor in the mooring force and the strength of wave force works much more in the full laden condition than in the lightship condition. And also the wave force changes to non-linear states according to the wave frequency and wave length. In addition, the maximum limit criteria of environmental force of prohibiting the entering ship on the berth and loading works controlled by the port authority concerned of Pyeongtaeg port fully satisfies the condition of the mooring limit force recommended by OCIMF that the safe permitted force of the mooring line have to be within 55 % of MBL.