Project Description

The U.S. Navy is addressing a capability gap in their expeditionary warfare forces performing missions abroad. Existing practices for mooring large warfare vessels require barges, cranes, underwater construction teams, and specialized training. This increases cost and precious time, which is not conducive to expeditionary missions. To resolve this complication, a temporary mooring system was designed to fit into three shipping containers (8 x 8 x 6.5 ft) that can be carried on a C-130 cargo aircraft to destinations around the world for rapid deployment. The containers are devised to act as a kit containing all the necessary mooring system components, equipment, and procedure documents.The kit will be comprehensive, including an assortment of line lengths for varying depths, an assortment of anchor types for varying bottom compositions (mud, sand, coral, rock, etc.), all the necessary connectors, buoys, and a penetrometer for remotely detecting the bottom composition. The assembled mooring system was modeled with an amphibious assault ship (LHA/LHD) plus simulated wind, current, and wave loads using AQWA and Orcaflex software. The resultant dynamics and stability of the system were analyzedfor future design iterations.