DETERMINATION OF MOORING LINES CONFIGURATION SUBMITTED TO CONCENTRATED LOADS, CURRENT PROFILE AND ON IRREGULAR SEABED.

The oil production in deepwater demands a previous knowledge of the floating units behavior when anchored under a specific environmental conditions and, thus, the programs of numerical simulations are fundamental tools. In this paper is shown a validated model to calculate the catenary static configuration, non-rigid to flexion and submitted to current profile in line plane direction and its own weight. There is also a consideration of soil bathymetry and horizontal or slanting plane, where line can lay down (conventional configuration) or be just suspended (taut-leg configuration). All the developed procedures are implemented in a program called CATENA and the results obtained, as well as the comparison to different programs that use other methods to calculate catenary configuration, are presented in the end. The main utility of CATENA is the possibility to determine the line configuration by many parameters, as geometrical or mechanical. In CATENA, is possible to give one of these referred parameters to determinate lines configuration, that can be horizontal, vertical or strain forces on fairlead or on anchor, mooring radius (the horizontal distance between anchor and fairlead), the angle between horizontal and strain force on fairlead and on anchor or the length of backed or suspended cable. The output data are these entire characteristics and line configuration. This program is a worthwhile tool for naval engineering due to its particular features that will be presented and the good results obtained in comparison to other methods. This work was developed with ANP (Agência Nacional do Petróleo- Brazil) resource