Experimental study on anti-heaving devices for very large floating structure

Abstract

This article presents an experimental study on various anti-heaving devices for a longish very large floating structure (VLFS). To reduce the heaving motion, a device in the form of a submerged plate is attached to the fore-end of the VLFS. We proposed a simple anti-heaving device, which is a submerged inclined plate. The performances of this device as well as three devices proposed in other previous studies, namely a horizontal plate, a vertical plate and an L-shaped plate, are investigated experimentally in the present work. A small scale model of VLFS with the plate attachments was tested in a wave-tank to assess their effectiveness in reducing the heaving motion. Experimental results show that the devices could significantly reduce the heaving motions of the VLFS. Among the four anti-heaving devices, the newly proposed inclined plate attachment seems to offer the best performance.