Proceedings of the Thirty-second (2022) International Ocean and Polar Engineering Conference
Shanghai, China, June 5–10, 2022
Copyright © 2022 by the International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers (ISOPE)
ISBN 978-1-880653-81-4; ISSN 1098-6189

www.isope.org

Experimental Investigation of Hydrodynamic Coefficients of Heave Plates for Floating Offshore Wind
Turbines
Lixian Zhang
Deepwater Engineering Research Center, Dalian University of Technology
Dalian, Liaoning, China

Wei Shi*
Deepwater Engineering Research Center, State Key Laboratory of Coast and Offshore Engineering, Offshore Renewable Energy Research Center,Dalian University of Technology,Dalian, Liaoning, China

Constantine Michailides
Civil Engineering department
International Hellenic University
Serres University Campus, Greece

Siming Zheng
School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics
University of PlymouthPlymouth, UKXin Li
Faculty of Infrastructure Engineering, State Key Laboratory of Coast and Offshore Engineering,
Dalian University of Technology,
Dalian, Liaoning, China

ABSTRACTINTRODUCTION

The hydrodynamic damping and added mass coefficients resulted
by the use of the heave plates placed at the floating offshore wind turbine(FOWT) platform are discussed and presented via an experimentalapproach. Different diameters of the heave plates are designed. The
objective of this paper is to investigate the contribution to the damping
and added mass coefficients for different diameters of the heave plates
by using forced oscillations of the FOWT. The effects of Keulegan–
Carpenter (KC) number range from 0.18 to 1.11 and frequency of forced
oscillation range from 0.40 Hz to 1.43 Hz and heave plate drafts range
from 0.34 m to 0.42 m to the hydrodynamic coefficients were also
analyzed. Over a variable Dd / Dc ( Dd - the diameter of the heave plates,
Dc -the diameter of the column) range from 1.5 to 2.5, calculations
indicate that the diameter of the heave plates affect the hydrodynamiccoefficients of the FOWT platforms. In addition, the hydrodynamiccoefficients of the heave plates are quite different with different KCnumbers.

Compared with traditional offshore oil and gas industry(Peng et al.,2021), Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) are considered to begood designs to exploit the tremendous wind energies in deep waters(Cheng et al., 2021; Ren et al., 2022; Wu et al., 2019). Among all thetypes of FOWTs, semisubmersible FOWTs have attracted more attention
due to the low construction cost, competitive mooring system cost, andwide applicability of water depth (Liu et al., 2016; Wang et al., 2022).
The semisubmersible FOWTs mainly consist of three columns
connected by a set of braces (Zhang et al., 2020; Zhao et al., 2021). Large
heave motion responses, will threaten the safety of the mooring systems
and affect the efficiency of the power generation (Tao and Dray, 2008).
To reduce the heave motions, heave plates are often attached at thebottom of the columns of semisubmersible FOWTs (Kvittem et al., 2012;
Roddier et al., 2010).
Several kinds of research including numerical simulation and tank tests
have been carried out to investigate the heave plate performance. Chung(1994; 1995) investigated the hydrodynamic performance of the vertical

KEY WORDS: Heave plate; tank tests; floating offshore wind turbine;hydrodynamic coefficient.

226