With the reviving demand for deep-sea oil and gas development, the design of FPSO is aiming at its enlargement. Super-large FPSO, as built in docking state, need to be concerned about its yielding strength and the loading capacity of the dockings under FPSO. The bearing reaction force should be taken into consideration when dockings are to be arranged. This paper chose a 400,000 tons deadweight FPSO as the research object, whose molded lines of bow, stern and bilge part changed rapidly and the flaring part of structure was comparatively more than other FPSOs, which resulted in more concentration of weight on the dockings at knuckle points. Therefore particular attention should be paid to the arrangement of heavy docking blocks. In this paper, the influence factors of the docking block bearing reaction force were explored. Based on finite element method, a set of optimized arrangement method could be summarized by the docking block reaction force analysis of different arrangement directions and different modules attached to the bottom, which could be used for reference for design and construction of super-large FPSO.
With the gradual rise of oil price and the recovery of oil and gas industry in recent years, FPSO has attracted more and more attention than it ever had before. With the rapid technological innovation, ships and other marine structure have been experiencing a new trend of upsizing. Due to the long service in a certain sea area and the high cost of round-trip, FPSO also followed the development process of ships and moved towards larger scales.
However, the upsizing of floating structures had led to a serious problem. The docking block, who had a limited carrying capacity, could not be laid out for the bow, stern or bilge side part of the ship due to the irregular molded lines (He, Xue, 2011). With the unstoppable developing towards upsizing of ships, the traditional docking block arrangement method had been gradually unable to meet the demand for general assembly of large ship in dockyard (Hwang, Roh, Lee, 2010) (Paik, Thayamballi, 2007). Therefore before the significant improvement of docking block load capacity, it is necessary to propose a docking block arrangement method to fulfill the demand of modern large ships.
