MPSO Design: Part 1 — Wave Excitation Forces and Moments

The MPSO is characterized by the use of hydrodynamics appendages, such as moonpool, beach and skirts, which improve the hydrodynamic behavior of the unit in waves. This type of platform may be designed for different offshore scenarios as, for example: the possibility of oil and gas storage, dry tree completion system and the use of steel catenary risers (SCR). An optimization procedure to choose the geometric dimensions of the MPSO becomes important in order to achieve the optimum hydrodynamic behavior to operate in harsh environmental conditions for each scenario. The optimization procedure might be useful in the preliminary design phases to reduce the verification time of the solution evaluated with model tests; for that reason it is necessary to create a database with experimental results to make the optimization procedure possible. The main idea of the study is to carry out an extensive experimental model test aimed at obtaining the parameters not well predicted using numerical codes. With this intent, the work is subdivided into three parts: Part 1 – Wave Excitation Forces and Moments; Part 2 – Damping and Added Mass Forces and Part 3 – Optimization Process. Results will be presented in different papers. The first one presents the experimental results for captive tests, the second one the experimental results for forced oscillation tests and the last one the methodology to use the experimental results as input in an optimization tool. The first paper presents the methodology in which nondimensional variables based on MPSO geometric characteristics were defined. These variables were related to a fixed moonpool diameter and they were determined in terms of four geometric dimensions: external diameter; height and diameter of the beach and platform draft. As a consequence, 21 different MPSO model geometries could be defined and experimentally tested in order to obtain the wave excitation forces and moments in 6 DOF. The experiments included transient waves so as to better understand the hydrodynamic behavior of the hull, such as, the response amplitude operator (RAO), cancelation points, the beach/bottom/moonpool effects for the different dimensions. The wave forces and moments obtained experimentally were compared to the results of a numerical code based on potential wave theory.