Vibration control of large floating offshore structures by means of damping plates: A case study

Large floating multi-purpose platforms are interesting and emerging concepts in terms of envisaged future development in the offshore engineering. The investigation on the hydrodynamic behaviour of such structures plays an important role in their characterization. In particular, vibration control and motion reduction of the platform may be crucial for its operation since most of the renewable energy converters cannot cater to large support motions (e.g. wind turbines, photovoltaic plants and OWC wave energy converters). With this as the background, a small-scale open-sea experimental investigation on a barge structure has been carried out in the Natural Ocean Engineering Laboratory (NOEL) in Reggio Calabria, Italy. The barge was equipped with removable vertical plates in order to investigate their effects on the structure dynamics and their optimal configuration, in terms of its motion attenuation. In addition, a numerical model using the commercial software Ansys AQWA (v. 16.1) is used to investigate its dynamic effects for five different configurations of the plates both in the time and in the frequency domains.