Project Description
During concept design for new offshore facilities, decisions often need to be made with only limited time and resources (for example, determining the hull geometry of an FPSO).
Experimental testing was undertaken in the 54 m long wave flume at the University of Western Australia (UWA) to investigate the effectiveness of a sponson in reducing greenwater; thereby providing support to an existing FPSO concept design process. The testing consisted of placing a fixed 1:100 scale model cross-section of an FPSO across the width of the flume and subjecting it to focused wave groups incident from the beam. The underlying spectrum for the wave groups were chosen to represent a realistic design sea state offshore the North West Shelf of Australia. In total two different drafts and two different wave group crest heights were considered. Tests were conducted with and without the sponson attached.
The testing was the first time a structure had been tested in the wave flume, and successfully demonstrated the ability to rapidly construct a custom model, conduct testing, and deliver results to inform concept design.
Fig 1: Snapshot close to the point of maximum freeboard exceedance. Test 6, deeper draft large crest height, with Sponson. Grid represents 1m x 1m at full-scale.