Effects of Connector Stiffness and Damping on Motion Response of a Multi-Module VLFS

摘要

To figure out the effects of the connector on a multi-module VLFS forfurther connector design, a set of different stiffness and damping connectorsis selected for analyzing their effects on constraining the modulesrelative motions and their own bearing load. The numerical model is developedbased on Orcaflex and validated against model test results. It isfound that the connector with very large stiffness although can providestrong constraints between modules for suppressing the relative motions,the connector load is incredibly large as expected. So the connector stiffnessshould be explicitly determined. Furthermore, the damping modelshould provide a high damping ratio in the frequency range where theincident wave dominates.