OptimizedBallastControlinLoadoutOperations

MartaCTapiaReyes
DENO/POLI/UFRJ
PeterKaleff
DENO/POLI/UFRJ
SandraGarciaRamon
PENO/POLI/UFRJ
JuanRodriguezSarmiento
PENO/POLI/UFRJ

ABSTRACT: The offshore industry has a high demand for Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSO) units,
mainly for deep and ultradeep water oil production. FPSO units are, in general, converted Very Large Crude Carrier
(VLCC) hulls. The conversion of VLCC hulls is generally performed in dry docks. A convenient alternative is to
perform the conversion on land since dry dock time is expensive and said conversions demand several months. In
order to transfer the VLCC hull to dry land a customized floating dry dock is necessary. The operation of setting the
VLCC hull afloat is quite conventional. However, the operation of transferring the hull to land, demands a complex
ballasting procedure of the floating dry dock which has to remain level and aligned with the quay at all times. A similar,
but inverted procedure (loadout) must be performed once the converted hull is to be set afloat. In the contribution
being proposed, the general formulation of the ballast tank filling problem will be presented for a generic equilibrium
state of a floating dry dock partially or totally supporting the hull to be transferred. The individual tank fillings of
dry dock corresponding to the equilibrium states considered will be determined by means of Microsoft Excels
Solver. The objective function for each equilibrium state will be to minimize the structural deflection of the dry dock.
The conditions of quay alignment and level deck will be imposed as constraints. Longitudinal strength requirements
thedrydockwillbeverifiedbutnotusedasconstraints.
1 INTRODUCTION
Floating dry docks are extensively used for repair and maintenance procedures in the shipping industry. Building or
converting ship hulls in dry docks (fixed or floating) is not profitable due to the high costs involved and due to the
extended duration of such endeavors. However, using a floating dry dock to transfer a ship hull to dry land may be
quite convenient since time and cost are reduced and the main task of conversion or extended maintenance may be
performedusinglandbasedfacilities.
Since floating dry docks are not designed to perform loadout operations, tank subdivision and pumping capability
must be increased. With an adequate amount of tanks and satisfactory pumping capability, the off loading task may be
convenientlyperformed.
Off loading a ship hull from a suitably modified floating dry dock implies strict ballast control. At any step of the
procedure the dry dock has to remain level and aligned with the off loading quay. This may be assured by controlling
thetankfillings.
Finding the suitable amount of ballast in each tank for each step of an off loading procedure may become a tedious
task when performed manually, even with digital backup from a spreadsheet or a hydrostatic calculation program,
since it implies a trial and error search and the amount of off loading steps must, in general, be very large to assure
satisfactorycontrol.Toexpeditetheprocessanautomatedprocedureisdesirable.
Although not strictly an optimization procedure, the search for a convenient tank filling picture for each step of an off
loading procedure may be very conveniently tackled by optimization techniques once the task is adequately
formulated as such and since optimization methods are increasingly available in automated or semiautomated form.
Moreover, since minimizing the structural demand is a convenient strategy to increase the structural life of a floating
drydockstructuraldemandoptimizationisaquitedesirablesideproductofthemaintaskbeingaddressed.
The present contribution contains an initial formulation of the problem at hand followed by an implementation section
covering the choice of the optimization method to be used and is closed by a sample loadoff calculation for a
conventionalVLCChullinwhichtheadvantagesandlimitationsoftheproposedstrategywillbecommented.
2 FORMULATION
The independent variables of the optimization procedure to be implemented are the volumetric tank fillings (v
Sometimes tank filling levels are chosen to simplify visualization but this implies additional processing to implement
procedure.
Twosetsofconstraintsareproposed.
The first affects the independent variables directly. Each tank filling will be subjected to a lower bound corresponding
to zero filling. Thus, no negative values of the independent variables are to be allowed. Similarly, each tank filling will
besubjectedtoanupperboundcorrespondingtothemaximumtankfillingofthattank.
The second relates to the task at hand, i.e. to maintain the dry dock level and aligned to the off loading quay at all
times.
To keep the loading deck of the dry dock aligned to the off loading quay it is sufficient to impose that the dry docks
freeboard (corresponding to the dry docks depth to the loading deck minus the dry docks draft) be equal to the
distancefromthewatersurfacetothequayedge.ThecorrespondingconditionisshowninEquation1.

D
(LB)
[(W W )+ ]
sh dd

v
i
d = 0 (1)

where:
disthedistancefromthewatersurfacetotheoffloadingquay
Listhelengthofthedrydock,
Bisthebreadthofthedrydock,
Disthedepthofthedrydock(measuredfromtheloadingdeckdothebottom),
W
sh
istheweightoftheshiphull,
W
dd
istheweightofthedrydock,
isthespecificgravityofthefluidkeepingthedockafloatandfillingtheballasttanks.
This is an exact formulation of the alignment constraint as long as the immersed portion of the dry dock and the tanks
areparallelepipeds.
The level maintenance condition corresponds to the assurance that the center of gravity of the dry dock will be
coincidentwitthecenteroffloatation(centroidoftheimmersedvolume)ofthedrydockandmaybewrittenas:

(W + )
sh

v
i
[(W x + x )]
sh sh

v
i i
= 0 (2)

where:
x
sh
isthedistanceofthecenterofgravityoftheshiphulltothemidlengthofthedrydock
x
i
arethedistancesofthecentersofgravityofthetankfillingstothemidlengthofthedrydock.
The above condition refers to longitudinal level maintenance only. It is assumed that any transversely distributed tanks
will be filled in a manner to maintain their compound centers of gravity at the longitudinal plane of symmetry of the
dock, thus assuring transverse level maintenance. It is also assumed that both the weight and the floatation of the dry
dockwillactatitsmidlength.
A possible third set of restrictions would be comprised by the limitations on structural demand. Imposing stress limits
would be the natural choice but, due to the structural complexity of ship hulls an underlying structural analysis would
be necessary impairing the imposition of the structural behavior restrictions in closed form. An accepted alternative
to impose limiting values to bending moments and shear forces acting on floating hulls considered as behaving like
beams of variable cross section [1]. This is acceptable as long as the length of the hull under consideration exceeds its
breadth by a factor of at least 5. However, the imposition of such limiting values would have to be performed on
several points along the hull and would lead to a very large number of additional individual constraints rendering the
searchfortheoptimumquiteunstable.Besides,theproblemwouldstillbelackinganobjective.
The acceptable alternative was to use a global strength parameter to comprise the objective of the search and to
perform a visual check on the shear forces and bending moments by displaying both on appropriate graphs for all
stepsoftheoffloadingprocessalongwiththeirlimitingrulevalues.
The natural choice for the objective would be to minimize the strain energy of the dry docks structure. However, an
equivalent, although less indicative of optimal usage of the structure, was preferred: the maximum deflection of the dry
dock. Whereas the strain energy is an absolute measure of structural optimality, the maximum deflection is
parameter familiar to naval architects besides providing additional directly verifiable information (by comparing the
hullsmidbodyandextremitydrafts)duringtheloadout(loadon)process.
Floating hulls may be considered as freefree beams since there are no concentrated supports present. Moreover
since dry docks tend to be prismatic, the deflection curve of a dry dock may by determined by double integration of
thebendingmomentfunction[2]asshownformallyinEquation3.

(3)

where:
Iistheconstantmomentofinertiaofthedrydockscrosssection
EisYoungsmodulus
M(x)isthebendingmomentfunction
The integrals in Equation 3 must be performed numerically since the bending moment function (itself the double integral
of the dry docks load function) is not analytically available. Likewise, the maximum deflection must also be defined
numericallybysearchingthediscretevaluesoftheresultingdeflectioncurve.
3 IMPLEMENTATION
As mentioned above, the chosen objective may only be implemented numerically since the bending moments acting on
the dry dock may only be defined at discrete points along its length. Again, this is due to the fact that the loads applied
by the ballast tanks, although constant inside each tank, vary among individual tanks rendering a closed form solution
verycomplex(duetotheamountoftermsinvolved)andpronetoerror.
However, since the dry dock is a prismatic structure, a numeric implementation is quite straightforward if an electronic
spreadsheet is used and the formulation and the corresponding calculations are performed semianalytically. In fact the
resultsofsuchimplementationareexact.
It is worth mentioning that several hydrostatic calculation programs are available which provide the necessary
informationbutveryrarelyinaninteractivemannerastoallowforanoptimizationalgorithmtosteerthesolutions.
Microsoft Excel was chosen for the implementation of the procedure due to its general availability to most
engineeringandresearchentities.
Regarding the optimization algorithm, Microsoft Excels Solver was used for a tentative initial implementation,
although the problem is linear and thus suitable for treatment by a wide range of existing and easily available (and
internallyprogrammable)linearornonlinearalgorithms.
4 SAMPLECALCULATION
The procedure was implemented for a floating dry dock with 300 m in length capable of carrying a VLCC type hull as
theoneshowninFigure1.

Figure1.TypicalVLCChull

ThefloatingdrydockscrosssectionisshowninFigure2.

Figure2.Crosssectionoffloatingdrydock

This is a conventional floating dry dock except for the number of tanks (20) established by trial and error running
generic implementation of the procedure until convergence was obtained for all (also 20) offloading steps. An
intermediate position of the VLCC hull (165 m) partly dry dock supported and partly land supported is shown in
Figure3.

Figure3.PartiallyoffloadedVLCChull

The shear force and bending moment curves along the dry docks length (as well as their limiting values) are shown
figures 4 and 5 as a function of the VLCCs hull position (0 m being fully dry dock supported and 300 m being fully
landsupported).

Figure4.ShearforcedistributionsandlimitingvaluesalongthedrydockslengthasafunctionoftheVLCCshullposition.

Figure5.BendingmomentdistributionsandlimitingvaluesalongthedrydockslengthasafunctionoftheVLCCshullposition.

Itmaybenoticedthatthevaluesofshearforceandbendingmomentremainbelowtheirlimitingvaluesatalltimes.
ThepictureofballasttankfillingsisshowninFigure6asafunctionoftheVLCCshullposition.

Figure6.TankfillingsasafunctionoftheVLCCshullposition.

It may be noticed that the majority of the ballast tanks show a consistent increase in volume being thus responsible for
keeping the dry dock aligned with the quay while the load of the VLCCs hull is being gradually transferred to dry
land. The extremity tanks on the other hand show a significant increase (or decrease) in volume being responsible for
keepingthedrydocklevel.
Finally,thedeflectioncurvescorrespondingtotheoffloadingstepschosenareshowninFigure7.

Figure7.DeflectioncurvesofthedrydockasafunctionoftheVLCCshullposition.
5 CONCLUSION
It was shown that an automated procedure is feasible avoiding a tedious manual trial and error enterprise to define the
ballast operations necessary to maintain a dry dock level and quay aligned during the offloading process of a VLCC
hull.
It was also shown that the objective of minimizing the dry docks deflections is an adequate choice both to provide
satisfactory convergence to the optimization process and to assure structural integrity by keeping shear forces and
bendingmomentsbelowtheirallowablevalues
Although not explicitly mentioned, VLCC hull flexibility was not considered. Given the lengths of the structures
involved,acheckontheeffectoftheVLCCshullflexibilityisavalidendeavortopursue.
Finally it is worth mentioning that the implementation presented herein became possible due to the quite usual but
extremely simplified shape of the dry dock considered. For dry docks with more complex shapes the simplifications
mademightnotapplyandtheformulationwouldhavetoberevised.
6 REFERENCES
Det Norske Veritas AS, 2008, "Hull Structural Design, Ships with Length 100 m and Above in Rules for Classification of Ships, Part
3,Chapter1,.Norway.
Muckle,W.,1967,StrengthofShipsStructures,EdwardArnold,London,.