Testing of Unmanned Floater Concept

Testing of an unmanned floater concept

Supervisors

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

Students

• Kirsten Chick
• Travis Germain

Project Description

This project involves the design and construction of the model floater concept, 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 in order to obtain high resolution measurements of heave response. The experimental data obtained through this project is used to understand the floater concept heave response in waves, to validate a numerical model of the floater motions, and to develop a response prediction tool.

Figure 1.  Instrumented scale model of a Unmanned Floating production Buoy concept (similar to that developed by Crondall Energy), built and deployed in the Swan River in order to understand vessel motion due to waves.