Proceedings of the ASME 27th International Conference on Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering

OMAE2008
June 15-20, 2008, Estoril, Portugal

OMAE2008-57895

THE DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF FPSO MOORING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Gang Ma and Liping Sun

Deepwater Engineering Research Center
Harbin Engineering University, China
Nantong Ave. No.145
Harbin China 150001
Phone: 86-451-82518398
Fax: 86-451-82518398
E-mail: [email protected],[email protected]

ABSTRACT programs in the computer to play these files. This system meets
Now FPSO (Floating Production Storage and Offloading) the requirement of users to get what they want efficiently.
has been widely used in exploitative engineering of offshore
petroleum/gas reservoir and becoming one of the most INTRODUCTION
important production facilities. FPSO which is a floating With China's offshore oil and gas engineering
structure has the virtue of sea keeping, permanent mooring, development, as a rational and effective economic production,
large oil storage, offshore unloading and recursive and so on. wellhead platform and floating production storage and
FPSO can be used in lots of kinds of oil fields. offloading devices (FPSO) have been widely used. FPSO is
The Paper mainly introduces software FPSO Mooring rapidly developing and has become an important offshore oil
Management System which is designed for CNOOC Oil Base and gas resource facility in china. The FPSO design and
Group. There are 17 FPSO serving in China Sea area, so that it manufacturing center for the industry is on the rise.
is becoming more and more serious on FPSO mooring system. China's FPSO design was from abroad in the past, the
The main failures of mooring system are as follows: broken of Chinese side lies in a passive position. In recent years, China
main bearing, fracture of YOKE transverse beam, crack of National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC) changes
anchor chain, leak of swivel head, local damage under typhoon operating thinking now by independent planning and design.
etc. FPSO Mooring Management System is designed to track The CNOOC Oil Base Group is responsible for the investment
and control FPSO mooring situation and to keep detailed and construction within the guarantee period, and ensures
information on FPSO mooring management, operation, quality and lower costs. It creates a new model of industrial
maintenance etc. This system puts chief data of 136 FPSO development of China FPSO.
together which are serving, under construction, maintaining in This new model reduces costs of FPSO projects for the
the world. This system also provides technical support for benefit of oilfield investors. It promotes China's shipbuilding,
company decision. metallurgy, and the development of relevant industries,
FPSO Mooring Management System is made with JSP, reducing the total investment in the oilfield, which has
using ORACLE as database, so it can run at any operating shortened the construction cycle and improves the profitability
system. This system offers access to upload folders and EXCEL of the oilfield. This new model has brought new profits not
files to database to save time and decrease errors in managing only for China National Offshore Oil Corporation, and is being
lots of data. There are a lot of kinds of files which should be developed as the pillar industries of CNOOC Oil Base Group,
classified by subject. In order to satisfy the need to get different and promotes their own development and growth. The FPSO is
united information not only by certain classification, this a technology-intensive industry, and demands a high level of
system is designed with open structure, it allows users to store management. The FPSO Mooring Management System is
files by any classification and own the power to change it. The developed to meet the requirements.
system offers different searching ways, by which user can get
what they want exactly, then the transfers corresponding

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 2 THE MAJOR TECHNOLOGICAL BREAKTHROUGHS A large number of risers are to get together to the turret,
IN FPSO APPLICATION IN CHINA due to space constraints, space for mooring chain and riser
FPSO is high investment, and technology-intensive layout is a key consideration.
industry. Many of the key technologies and technical For spreading mooring, as risers are along the outer
difficulties are in this area, China embarked on introduction, surface of the hull and turret mooring is relatively easy to
digestion, absorption and innovation. Many technical problems produce high speed collisions, especially for the supply vessel.
in design, construction and installation of various aspects have The mooring system, if its basic plan has been scheduled, it still
been resolved. China has accumulated rich experience, and needs to address the issue of space limitations. The turret
established a China FPSO technical capacity and mooring system uses grouped mooring mode.
characteristics. The following shows the main breakthroughs:
¾ Master the FPSO comprehensive evaluation and
functional design technology ;
¾ Efficient integrated design optimization technology;
¾ Realize large multi-fuel electric power stations used in
FPSO ;
¾ Single point mooring location by the application of new
technologies ;
¾ The first operation of FPSO in the condition of ice ;
¾ Large FPSO is firstly used in the shallow water.
With the FPSO development of China, China has Fig3.1 Spreading Mooring
promoted a number of independent intellectual property rights
related to the birth of patented technology, and through
practice, the progressive development of the Chinese FPSO
construction, maintenance and security regulations.

Fig3.2 Grouped Mooring

Relevant agencies confirmed the experimental results that
the maximum tension in grouped mooring is less 20% than in
spreading mooring, and maximum offset in rough situation is
less 5%, so that grouped mooring is more effective.
Fig2.1 The developing FPSO in China
For shallow water mooring (below 100 meters), mooring
chain is adopted fully. To save costs, wire rope which is
3 FPSO MOORING SYSTEM
relatively light is used to replace the mooring chain.
The software is mainly designed for FPSO mooring
The deep water mooring(300 meters above),wire rope is
system. According to different waters/sea state conditions, the
usually taken as the suspended part of mooring line to increase
world's main FPSO mooring is by the following ways: single
strength, reducing the upper tension. For the same strength, the
point mooring, spread mooring system, the dynamic
wire rope is only 1/3 to 1/5 weights per unit length of anchor
positioning system. In accordance with the American Bureau of
chain.
Shipping, single point mooring is divided into: catenary anchor
In the ultra deep water mooring (2000 meters above),
leg mooring system (CALM), single anchor leg mooring
lighter polyester fiber cable is the replacement. Its advantages
system SALM (SALM), the turret mooring, and mild steel arm
are: a bigger ratio of strength/weight, good elasticity; cost
(Soft Yoke) four groups. According way mooring points, a
much lower than the wire rope up to 50 percent maximum.
single point mooring can be divided into: buoy mooring, tower
Studies and analyses indicate that in the ultra deep water, harsh
mooring and turret mooring. The main failures of mooring
environmental conditions of the waters, there is a clear
system are as follows: broken of main bearing, fracture of
advantage for polyester fiber cable.
YOKE transverse beam, crack of anchor chain, leak of swivel
Also, submerged buoys can be taken into account to
head, local damage under typhoon etc.
overcome the problem. These buoys will reduce vertical load
on the tower due to suspension mooring legs in the water. In
3.1 Distribution and Construction of Mooring Line

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 the fair lead of cable, as the vertical load is reduced, the focusing on the FPSO mooring system. There is an extremely
strength of mooring system is increased. complex classification, and the contents cover all kinds of
audio and video files and different types of text files. The
3.2 Anchor software needs to meet such demand.
Mooring point fixed in the seabed is the key parts of 2 Fast and accurate searching method: As information is
mooring system to maintain FPSO mooring in a certain range. very complex, therefore, it is unrealistic to get result by
According to the status of the seabed and mooring performance manually operation. A fast and accurate searching method is
requirements, type of anchor will be different. There are two extremely necessary. Due to diversity of document format,
main types: different means of retrieval are created to complete exhaustive
¾ traditional embedded drag anchor search.
¾ the anchor designed to resist vertical loads 3 Data management: information change is inevitable, as
anchor(VLAs), such as vertical suction anchor the adjustment of the content is usually a wide range of
When suction anchor is after leaving the sea bed, it will be changes, therefore, it is essential to provide convenient and fast
completely incapacitated. By comparison, the traditional drag management tool.
anchor can play a significant role in maintaining capacity even
in the harsh environment with certain movement. In addition, at 4.2 Software Structure Design
the scene of the seabed in the soil, there are still some uncertain Behind its strong support of the Java technology, Java
factors, the ABS raised higher requirement for suction anchor Web technology will be preferred in the development of large-
than the traditional anchor for the safety. scale, enterprise-level applications. In the Java Web
Embedded traditional drag anchor is considered more Application, it contains the following elements: Servlet and
advantages than the VLA. If the environmental conditions are JSP, static documents and so on. The most important
over design, anchor will be movable. Dragging anchor is still components of JAVA WEB applications are Servlet and JSP.
able to maintain its own capacity. In addition, as the movement JSP (Java Server Pages) is a new generation of site
of the anchor, tension in the mooring line will be able to be development language based on the SUN JAVA technology,
mutually adjusted. but also the technical procedures for the development of WEB
background. It implements the script compiler implementation.
3.3 The Mooring for China Ocean Operational speed, safety and easy expansion are all better than
Generally Speaking for the China Sea, Bohai Bay ASP and PHP. It is an open technology, owning platform and
environment is relatively modest, operating relatively in server independence.
shallow depth (20 m or so), should not use catenary mooring FPSO Mooring Management System uses JSP plus
system, because catenary effect is almost non-existent. Tower JavaBeans which belong to classic design patterns. In this
mooring is suggested, especially soft YOKE above water mode, the JSP pages are in response to the request and return
mooring. South China Sea environment is relatively poor, a the results to the customer, all database operations and complex
tropical storm. Operating depth is in the general of 100 meters business logic operations are through JavaBeans to be treated.
to 350 meters. Before the coming of the storm, workers need to The technology achieves separation of the performance and
leave FPSO, and FPSO is not released from mooring system, so logical operation. FPSO Mooring Management System is a
that inside turret mooring is used. JAVA WEB application, using the typical three-tier software
architecture which is described as following.
4 FPSO MOORING MANAGEMENT SYSTEM DESIGN Customers: to provide a browser-based customer interface.
AND IMPLEMENTATION Customers can browse the Web server and send static or
The software of FPSO Mooring Management System sets dynamic HTML pages. As this system is based on B/S
focus on recording information on the FPSO mooring, structure, the client demand is particularly low.
including the FPSO management in China Sea, China's marine WEB server: JSP and JavaBeans components are running
environment, FPSO fault cases and emergency response on the WEB server, JSP is responsible for dynamically
technology, day-to-day operation and maintenance technology, generating HTML pages, and JavaBeans is responsible for the
summary of moorings for different water depth in China, the database and transaction processing. This layer is specifically
FPSO mooring system design analysis, FPSO component designed to deal with the first request, and the third layer
technology as well as some relevant information of database server transacts processing upon request, and then
international FPSO. returns the results to the first layer.
Database: storage and maintenance of data.
4.1 System Requirements Analysis
The software of FPSO mooring management system needs 4.3 Software Design Environment
to realize the following main functions: Software: Windows XP operating system and application
1 Storing material in accordance with different types: The software;
system involves all aspects of the FPSO, at the same time, Hardware: CPU, not less than 2.1MHz (For web server);

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 Database: Oracle10.0;
WEB server: Tomcat5.0;

4.4 Key Technologies

The software has been equipped to CNOOC Oil Base
Group for managing FPSO in China Ocean. All kinds of data
about FPSO have been registered into the database. Clients
who gain the corresponding privileges can read or register
information in the software wherever they are. The software
has been used for half a year now and running well.
FPSO mooring management system is a typical database
application development. In the development of the system,
key technologies have been applied mainly in the following: Fig4.2 Example of Paging Technology
4.4.1 Database Connection 4.4.3 File Uploading
In a traditional database connection mode, WEB Server File uploading function in the B/S-based development
has to establish a database connection for every request. When model is very common. Compared to other development tools,
a large number of concurrent operations occur, the system may JSP is not good enough to support uploading files. The way to
be shut down. At the same time, the server must ensure that uploading file in JSP is as following: Use method
every connection can be properly closed. If there is an getInputstream() in class ServletRequest to obtain a client
abnormal procedure to lead to the closure of some connections, request data, and deal with the data flow then insert them into
the database will lead to memory leaks, and ultimately will the database. Usually JSP does not address the uploading
have to be restarted. In the software, database connection pool function, but to put these functions in the Servlet or JavaBeans
is used to solve above problems. The database connection pool to achieve.
is a section of program which is made according to the actual
condition in the software.

Database

Connection Pool

Web Server

Clients

Fig4.1 Database Connection

4.4.2 Paging Technology

Paging technology mainly refers to read data from the
database and display appropriate to read. This software is to
turn the pages each time from the database only by searching
page size data block. Although each page needs to query the
database, data transmission network does not matter for a very
small number of records. Using of the pool can solve the most
time-consuming database linking process and there is a variety Fig4.3 Interfaces to Upload File and Folder
of database optimization techniques used to enhance the
searching speed. The paging technology is shown at the bottom 4.4.5 Playing Files
in the following figure. The files in the database have different files. The software
is designed to play these files with responding metheods.The
player is embedded in the pages for video and audio files.

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 Other file players are activated by the configuration of MIMI in 5 CONCLUSIONS
JSP files. So if the client PC has installed application software, As China's vigorous development of the FPSO, wealth of
they will play all files on line successfully. The following experience and more information have been accumulated and
shows a picture displayed in the software. will be stored in this software. The software makes use of
database connection pool to reduce the time of link process.
The convenient uploading interface allows clients to upload
single file and folder. The dynamic tree menu and paging
technology is proposed to display necessary data efficiently.
Different players are responsible for playing files correctly.
FPSO Mooring Management System is reasonable for data
classification storage and displaying data efficiently. This
software will be helpful in the development of FPSO
management.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors would like to express their sincere thanks to
the support of “111” Project of China. Thanks are also given to
Fig4.4 Example of Playing files those who actively participated in the verification work.

4.4.6 Dynamic Tree Menu REFERENCES

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different category. There is a big problem on how to display Considerations on FPSO mooring system design, Shipbuilding
them. The dynamic tree menu technology makes use of AJAX of Chian, 2005
(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and database to display 2 Tan Jinxing, Liu ZhenGuo, Jing Yong, Single Point
necessary data only every time. When new request is Mooring System for FPSO used in Deep Water, Shipbuilding
generated; new data will be displayed in corresponding place of Chian, 2005
while the remaining data is not changed. Dynamic tree menu is 3 Zhang WuKui, LiuZhenGuo, Song Ruin, Key
shown in the left part of the page. Technologies used in FPSO, Shipbuilding of Chian, 2005
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Mooring System of Very Large Floating Oil Storage Vessels
Considering Failure of Breakwater, China Offshore
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6 Wang XingRu, The repairing technology of single point
mooring equipment of FPSO, China Ship repair, 2006

Fig4.5 FPSO Mooring Management System

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