MOORING

Introduction
Types
Line Materials
Uplift Anchors
Alternate Anchors
Mooring Arrays
Anti-Tangle

> Anti-Tangle

Anti-Tangle Device

Concept

A component to reduce the chance of mooring lines becoming entangled and particularly electrical cables becoming repeatedly wrapped around other components due to the rotation of the device.

Solution

A novel solution was investigated and the best resulting outline design was chosen. The solution proposed assumes that the device is connected centrally using a solid strut. By employing a solid stopper to limit rotation to one hundred and eighty degrees of motion the device can only cycle through this area, although this range could be increased to almost a full three hundred and sixty degrees if required. The central idea is to not allow the device go through a full rotation and repeat this over and over again. The flexible submarine electrical cable could be safely connected to the device, knowing that the device is limited to this range of motion.
This could have an added benefit in an array scenario. By placing the anti-tangle devices in opposing directions parallel devices could be placed inside the perceived buffer zone limit, in the knowledge that adjacent devices could not collide.
An advance on the concept would be to employ dampers and actuators in the assembly. The dampers to resist shock forces imposed by the strut and actuators to encourage the device to begin its rotation at the end of the slack water part of the tidal cycle.