Fatigue reliability of mooring chains, including mean load and corrosion effects

Abstract

A reliability formulation for mooring chain fatigue is developed, including the effects of mean load and degradation due to corrosion. They are included by starting from a S-N model with parameterized dependence to the mean load and a customized corrosion condition scale. The paper includes a thorough case study, based on a realistic case. A global sensitivity analysis is used to justify a reduction of the model dimension. A reliability analysis is then performed, and the effect on failure probability from variation of a range of parameters and model assumptions is studied.