Hydrodynamic interactions of three barges in close proximity in a floatover installation

The hydrodynamics of side-by-side barges are much more complex than those of a single barge in waves because of wave shielding, viscous effects and water resonance in the gap. In the present study, hydrodynamic coefficients in the frequency domain were calculated for both the system of multiple bodies and the isolated body using both low-order and higher-order boundary-element methods with different element numbers. In these calculations, the damping-lid method was used to modify the free-surface boundary conditions in the gap and to make the hydrodynamic results more reasonable. Then far-field, mid-field and near-field methods were used to calculate wave-drift forces for both the multi-body system and the isolated body. The results show that the higher-order method has faster convergence speed than the low-order method for the multi-body case. Comparison of different methods of computing drift force showed that mid-field and far-field methods have better convergence than the near-field method. In addition, corresponding model tests were performed in the Deepwater Offshore Basin at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Comparison between numerical and experimental results showed good agreement.