Testing of a self-installing Spar platform

Testing of an unmanned floater concept

Status: Complete (February 2018 to November 2018)

Supervisors

• Andrew Grime
  Senior Research Fellow, Oceans Graduate School, UWA
• Lifen Chen
  Research Fellow, Oceans Graduate School, UWA

Students

• Gavin Lane
• Siyu Liu

Project Description

This project involved the design and construction of the in-place configuration of a self-installing Spar platform, taking into account relevant scaling laws, hydrodynamics and the metocean regime at the deployment site. This project leveraged the instrumentation development elsewhere within the Riverlab, and the lessons learned as part of the recent Unmanned Floater Concept project, in order to obtain high resolution measurements of heave, surge and sway response. The experimental data obtained through this project was used to understand the ACE-Spar response to random waves. These results were used to validate a numerical model of the ACE-Spar motions in order to develop a response prediction tool.

This work is sponsored by Arup who are providing both financial and in-kind support in order to help further their understanding of the Arup Concept Elevator Spar (ACE-Spar) concept.

Figure 1. An instrumented scale model of a self-installing Spar platform (similar to the “ACE-Spar” concept developed by Arup) built and deployed in the Swan River in order to understand vessel motion due to waves.