Active heave compensation on drill-ships in irregular waves

This paper investigates a possible method for heave compensation on board deep-water drill-ships subjected to irregular-wave excitation. The proposed system exploits favorable interaction of coupled oscillators to achieve the desired results. This study examines an actively controlled compensator which performs well over a large wave-frequency bandwidth. Performance under certain operating conditions is investigated using a dynamic model. Simple mathematical arguments and frequency-domain computations in an irregular wave spectrum show the proposed heave compensation system to be effective within the bounds of linearity.