Page 230 - Practical Design Ships and Floating Structures

Practical Design of Ships and Other Floating Structures 205
You-Sheng Wu, Wei-Cheng Cui and Guo-Jun Zhou (Eds)
0 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON
THE HYDROELASTIC RESPONSE CHARACTERISTICS
OF A PONTOON TYPE FLOATING STRUCTURE

T.Y. Chung', J.H. Chung', S.Y. Hon$ and Y.J. Ji3
'Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials,
Yusung P.O. Box 101, Daejeon, 305400, Korea
'Korea Research Institute of Ships and Ocean Engineering,
Yusung P.O. Box 101, Daejeon, 305-600, Korea
3Super Century Co., Ltd,
220 Kung-Dong, Yusung-Gu, Daejeon, 305-764, Korea

ABSTRACT
A model test with the scale ratio of 1/20 was carried out to investigate the hydroelastic response
characteristics of a pontoon type floating structure in waves. In particular, the response-dependence on
the water depth was investigated by the comparison with the other existing experimental results. As
one of the most important findings, it was found that the hydroelastic response of a pontoon type
floating structure decreases as water depth becomes shallow, which can be explained by the decreased
wave exciting pressures and the increased added mass effects of the surrounding water with decreasing
water depth.

KEYWORDS
Hydroelastic response, Pontoon-type very large floating structure, Model tests, Added mass effect

1 INTRODUCTION

The increasing demand for the use of ocean space is accelerating the study on very large floating
structures. Hydroelastic behavior is one of the unique characteristics of very large floating structures
and has been studied by many authors mainly theoretically or numerically (Kashiwagi 1999). The
experiments on this type of structures are difficult because of the huge scale ratio of the real
structure/model and the horizontal/vertical scale. Some experimental works (for example, Yago and
Endo, 1996; Shin et al., 1999) have been done in the recent past in order to validate the theoretical or
numerical approach.

Yago and Endo (1996) carried out tank tests using a scaled model to investigate hydroelastic response
characteristics of the prototype structure that was constructed for the tests of very large floating