Multi-point Mooring Winch

The offshore industry requires efficient, reliable and safe multi-point mooring winch systems. For some marine floating structures, such as drilling ships, drilling platforms, oil production platforms and buoy ships, salvage rescue boats, engineering ships, barges, FPSO, etc., when there is a certain limit on the displacement according to the operation requirements, multi-point mooring winch system will be used for positioning.

Multi-point Mooring Winch Arrangement

Our professional winch engineers can formulate the most stable and efficient arrangement schemes for various types of offshore vessels and platforms that require multi-point mooring winch.

For example, for the four-point mooring system, according to the requirements of different customers, the four-point mooring winch can be designed as a single drum + single warp head (optional), that is, there are four single-drum mooring winch units on board, or, the 4-point mooring winch can be a double drum configuration, that is, there are only two sets of double drum mooring winches on board. For offshore support barges which are moored in proximity of offshore jackets or platforms, depending on the size of the barge, there are generally 4 or 8 point mooring winch systems. For offshore heavy lifting barges which usually perform heavy lift, there are usually 8 or 12 point mooring systems.

Why Do You Need a Multi-point Mooring System?

According to the number of mooring points in the mooring positioning system, it can be divided into single point mooring system and multi-point mooring system. Then, why do we need multi-point mooring system?

One of the most important points is that the existing multi-point mooring positioning system solves the problem of low ship positioning accuracy of the single point mooring positioning winch system in harsh sea conditions.

Using a single point mooring system, the ship is connected to a mooring point on the sea through a mooring cable tied to the bow or stern of the ship. Its working principle is: a single-point mooring ship can change its position with the environment and sea conditions like a weathervane, and uses the tension of the mooring line to resist external interference.

However, single-point mooring operations will become difficult when nonlinear ship wave hydrodynamics are generated by slow-varying drift forces. These forces cause the mooring system to approach the response frequency and generate large swings and high mooring forces, reducing the regularity and reliability of loading operations, also dangerous for loading platforms.

Therefore, when the single-point mooring force exceeds the set value, the ship cannot maintain fixed-point orientation in a certain area, and it is necessary to rely on the ship’s multi-point mooring system to control the ship’s positioning. That is to say, the single point mooring positioning system cannot achieve ship positioning accuracy under severe sea conditions.

In a word, the multipoint positioning mooring system can realize the efficient, reliable and precise positioning of the ship in severe sea conditions.