A Study on the Behavior of Huge Floating Structure in Regular Waves

Recently, the size of floating structures has become greater, and in the near future, huge floating structures, such as offshore floating plants and floating airports, seem to be brought into practical use. In the cases of these structures, elastic deformation due to waves may be of the order which cannot be neglected in comparison with the motion as rigid body.In this paper, the author dealt with the problem of wave-induced behavior of huge floating structures theoretically, regarding them as the so-called “uniform beam on elastic foundation”. Model tests were carried out selecting two prototypes, and fairly good agreement was obtained between measured results and calculated ones. The theoretical calculations were also made for series prototypes to examine the effects of the length and rigidity on the behavior.As the result, it became clear that the effect of elasticity should be taken into consideration to evaluate the wave-induced response of floating flat structures far larger in size than the existing ones.