Experimental investigation on a towing assessment for a floating desalination plant for Egypt

Abstract

Supplying freshwater to remote coastal communities has become challenging due to poor infrastructure and these areas being far from national grids of water in Egypt. A novel FPSO desalination plant powered by on-grid source was proposed to reduce the freshwater shortage in remote coastal cities. The innovative concept has mobility feature to serve different coastal locations depending on seasonal water demand. Since the proposed concept is subjected to wet towing operation to transfer from one site to another, evaluating the motion behaviour during towing operation can improve the reliability of the platform design and reduce the risk during the operation. In this context, the main objective of this study is to experimentally investigate the motion responses of proposed concept in both mooring and towing cases. Furthermore, the calm water resistance at different forward speed and different load conditions were analysed during towing assessment. The results show that variation of peak responses of heave and pitch motions with intensity of towing forward speed may indicate effect of phase lags motion nonlinearity on the overall model response. A clear correlation between towing speed and peak response frequency is demonstrated. The analysed results reproduce the general trends in the observed reduction in the natural frequency and its RAO peak with the towing speed level for different load cases.