Cargo can be handled by quay cranes or ship,s own gear.

Safe working conditions are determined by hatch

openings and cargo parcel sizes. The criteria recommended by the Working Group are based on the
studies carried out by the Nordic countries as discussed earlier and the results are shown in Table 1.2.The
hinged connection makes movement between two semisubmersible modules possible. Its aim is to
minimize the forces interacting between two platforms and, at the same time, to prevent longitudinal
movement in the forward/reverse, drift and heave (surge, sway and heave) positions. This is thanks to the
relatively large rotations in roll, pitch and yaw. An extensive reseârch programme was ca¡ried out by the
No¡dic countries to establish acceptable criteria of moored fishing vessels. Motions of moored ships were
measured at a number of ports for various ships being unloaded by different gear. Acceptable motions
were dete¡mined based on interviews with shiþ crews and port operators (Jensen et al., 1g90) and are
shown in Table t.2. By implementing connectors that act as shock absorbing systems, rather than fixed or
rigid connectors, fewer fatigue problems may affect the super-structure. With these relatively large
rotations, the system was unfortunately not suitable for an airport in which civil aircraft operated. In the
direct method, the equations of motion also appear in the same form as Eq. (3.113). However, the modal
response ζl would be replaced by the nodal response (i.e. the response at the nodal points of the structure)
wl . Thus, the stiffness and mass matrices come directly from the FEM model of the structure. Naturally,
the added-mass matrix should have the same degree of freedoms as the number of nodes (or total degree
of freedom of the nodes) located on the wetted-surface of the floating body. Although this would increase
the computational time and storage requirement, the analyst need not worry about the convergence on
the number of modal functions to be used. For example, Yago and Endo (1996) and Kashiwagi (1998b)
used the direct method to solve the hydroelastic response of VLFS in regular waves. In order to couple the
problem between the structure part and the fluid part, there exist two competing approaches. These two
approaches are sometimes referred to as the modal method and the direct method. In the modal method,
the flexural response of the structure is represented by a combination of the global modal responses of
the structure. If each modal response corresponds to the natural mode for the vibration of the structure
in air, the method may be called the dry-mode superposition method. The structural type of mooring
dolphins is broadly classified under the gravity-type structure, such as a caisson and a cellular bulkhead,
and the pile type structure, such as a vertical-pile pier, a coupled-pile pier and a jacket type. A gravity-
type dolphin is dealt with as a rigid body and is designed so that the interaction force between the dolphin
and the mooring systems does not exceed the resistance force for sliding. A pile-type structure appears
to be an elastic body but it is treated as a rigid body because its rigidity is much larger than that of the
rubber fender. A high-tensile steel is often used for piles of flexible dolphins in order to make use of the
energy absorption by the dolphin itself. The complex load deformation characteristics of both piles and
fenders should be adopted in the numerical simulations for determining the motions and mooring forces
of a floating structure. The load-deformation characteristics in the horizontal direction of the pile-type
dolphin may be calculated by various methods the method by Blum, or by Chang (1937), or by Matlock
(1970) and Reese et al. (1975), which conforms with the API method (1976) and by Kubo (1964), and
Hayashi and Miyajima (1963), which conforms to the PHRI method (1996); by FEM, and so on. On the
other hand, if each modal response corresponds to the natural mode for vibration of the structure in fluid,
the method may be referred to as the wet-mode superposition method. In actual applications, the dry-
mode superposition method is frequently used since the dry-modes can be obtained in a straightforward
manner by any standard FEM package. In some cases, the direct method is used. In the direct method,
the response of the structure is not represented through a superposition of the global modal responses.
Instead, the response of the structure is directly represented by, for example, the nodal responses if the
structure is modeled by FEM. In most cases, the direct method is computationally more demanding than
the modal method. Thus, nowadays the dry-mode superposition method seems more frequently used
than the direct method for the actual design of a VLFS.