At-sea towing of a Mega-Float unit

A huge floating offshore platform (359m long, 60m wide, and 3m deep) was towed into the Pacific Ocean for a validation experiment for a floating airport. Full-scale measurements of towline tension and the bending strain on the upper-deck were made during towing. The measured bending moment agreed well with numerical calculation without taking the draught and towing speed into consideration.     

Quasisteady theory for the hydrodynamic forces on a circular cylinder undergoing vortex-induced vibration

Vortex-induced vibrations of a rigid circular cylinder were studied by constructing a theory based on a wake oscillator model under quasisteady approximations, thereby evaluating vortex-induced hydrodynamic forces acting on the cylinder. A lock-in limit line representing the boundary for the occurrence of frequency lock-in was also theoretically derived. Hydrodynamic forces in forced oscillation problems estimated by the theory were compared with measured ones. Although some discrepancies were found, particularly in cases with high-frequency oscillations, good agreement was achieved in most cases. Accordingly, we conclude that the present theory captures well real phenomena in the wake downstream of a cylinder subjected to a flow.     

Slamming load on a very large floating structure with shallow draft

The objective of this paper is to estimate the slamming load acting on a pontoon-type very large floating structure with a shallow draft. Experiments were carried out using elastic models with different rigidities in regular waves. The results revealed that the slamming load was strongly influenced by the rigidity of the model. The conditions under which slamming occurs depended on the extent of the bottom emergence and the velocity of the relative wave height at the bow of the model. These results were related to a simple procedure for estimating slamming load.