Experimental Investigation on Hydrodynamic Behavior of the Geometric Spar Platform

1.IntroductionThe spar technology has been used off shore for many years in applications such as research ves-sels,communicationrelaystations,andstorage and offloading platformslikethe Brent spar(Downieetal.,2000;Incecik,2000;Marcioet al.,2003).In1996,the…

Experimental Investigation on Hydrodynamic Behavior of the Geometric Spar Platform

In recent years, attention has been focused on the spar platform for gas and oil exploitation in deep water. With the development of offshore technology, many new spar concepts have been put forward and fully studied. This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation on the hydrodynamic behavior of a new spar concept from Novellent Offshore LLC, USA, which is called Geometric Spar (G-spar). A new type of buoyancy can concept from the same company, viz. Integrated Buoyancy Can (IBC), is researched in the meantime. The G-spar and IBC models with a 1:70 scale are tested in the State Key Laboratory of Ocean Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University for the global performance of the spar hull, in which the second-order wave drift force is involved, as well as the effect of heave plates on the motion characteristics and mooring force of the G-spar platform.