Abstract
Moonpools on drilling vessels are structures located at the mid-ship position to facilitate drilling and other marine operations. The existence of the moonpools is prone to result in intense resonant fluid behaviors even other unexpected violent nonlinear impact on the flow system under external excitations, especially for those types with one or more recesses.
The present study focuses on the resonant fluid behaviors and the induced violent nonlinear effects so-called slamming in a moonpool with a recess within the frameworks of both theoretical and numerical investigations. The natural frequencies of the piston mode and the first-three modes of the studied moonpool are approximated based on the theoretical formulas extracted from the linear potential flow theory. Furthermore, the calculated frequency of piston mode are carried out as the external wave excitations combined with varying current velocity to investigate the slamming effects at the typical locations such as the wall of the moonpool and the bottom of the recess. Finally, the characteristics of the slamming pressure both in space and time are discussed in detail based on the RANS-based numerical simulations.
The result shows that the resonant fluid behaviors under the wave-current interactions are greatly different from the wave-only excitations. Moreover, intense slamming occur in a moon-pool with a recess under some particular wave-current interactions due to the shallow water effects in the recess region and the phenomenon of energy transfer. The phenomenon of slamming must be treated with special cautions in practical engineering because of the fact that some induced adverse effects could weaken the hydrodynamic performance of the drilling vessel, as well as the structural strength of the moonpool.
