The exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of Japan has a very large area because Japan consists of many islands. As the worldwide supply and demand of natural resources and food are being tight, the technology for the effective use of the EEZ will become the key for the future development of Japan. From this background, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism of Japan (MLIT) started an R&D project of floating offshore platform technologies in 2007. In this project an integrated design support tool, called “Harmonic Design Tool”, has been developed for evaluating economical and safety aspects of the offshore platforms. At the first stage, the tool makes the basic planning based on many kinds of relating datasets. In the second and third stages, safety assessment and economic evaluation are carried out by datasets and numerical simulation programs. In this paper the outlines of the total tool, each stage, some technical components and a trial estimate for seafloor massive sulphides (SMS) mining platform are presented.

Volume Subject Area:
Ocean Space Utilization
Topics:
Design, Industrial research, Mining, Offshore platforms, Safety, Computer simulation, Economic analysis, Food products, Natural resources, Seabed, Supply and demand
This content is only available via PDF.
Copyright © 2010
 by ASME
You do not currently have access to this content.