Changes of Mooring Force due to Structural Modification of a Barge Ship

Structural modifications of a ship may cause a fatal accident such as sinking and wrecking of ship. Especially, barge ship can be easily reconstructed to load more bulk cargo. In this study, for a real accident case, change of mooring force due to structural modification was analyzed to evaluate accident risk. A two dimensional dynamic model for the barge ship was constructed to compute mooring forces with related to floating motion. The equation of motion was established in Matlab code and buoyancy was calculated by using direct integration of submerged volume. The results showed that wind force, current force, and mooring force after rebuilding was approximately 4.3 kN, 14 kN, 1,561 kN respectively. The maximum force of mooring force according to the length of mooring cable were 1,614 kN at 30 m of mooring cable. Thus, an arbitrary modification of ship lead instability and unreliable result so that illegal rebuilding of ship should be avoided.