Three traditional bunkering, i.e. tank car bunkering, shore station bunkering and bunker vessel bunkering are presented and investigated. Among three scenarios, bunker vessel is the best way to bunker in terms of flexibility and bunkering capacity. The mooring system is one of the key technologies for bunker vessel bunkering to the dual fuel large vessel. The key points of side by side bunkering mooring system design are introduced, including mooring equipment, mooring arrangement, mooring calculation, etc. The calculation of side by side bunkering mooring system in the docking is conducted. It shows that HMPE ropes should be preferred for the bunker vessel.Additionally, the mooring design scheme of mooring line in combination with fender is capable of meeting the limited operation environmental conditions specified by OCIMF. These findings are helpful for the bunkering mooring system design of dual fuel ships.
In order to meet the increasingly strict emission requirements of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), one of the options is to use LNG as fuel. At present, there are some large vessels that use LNG as main fuel and arrange LNG storage tanks on board. Bunkering is the process of transferring LNG from the bunker station into the LNG storage tank of the ship, and it is the first step for LNG usage on dual fuel vessels. LNG bunkering for vessels mainly includes the following three scenarios (Xu, Fan and Wu et al.,2015): tank car bunkering, shore station bunkering and bunker vessel bunkering. Given that tank car bunkering does not require many supporting measures, it becomes one of the commonly used bunkering methods at present. For example, it has been widely used in northern Europe. The shore station bunkering method has been applied in both northern Europe and China. Since the world's first LNG bunker vessel was put into operation in early 2013, more and more LNG bunker vessels have been put into use or are under construction. Their bunkering positions have great flexibility and can be operated at the docking or at sea. Therefore, LNG bunkering mooring system is one of the key technologies in the bunkering design of dual fuel large vessel. To date, relevant research on the bunkering system of dual fuel large vessel is mostly limited to the pipeline design(Kuai,Jing and Li et al.,2018), implying that the research on the key mooring system is rarely reported.
