OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion) Cold Water Pipe At-Sea Test Program. Phase 2. Suspended Pipe Test

摘要

An important step in the development of technology for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) cold water pipes (CWP) is the at-sea testing and subsequent evaluation of a large-diameter fiberglass-reinforced plastic (FRP) pipe. Focus has been on the CWP since it is the most critical element in any OTEC design. This report presents the results of the second phase of the CWP At-Sea Test Program. During this phase an 8-foot diameter, 400-foot long sandwich wall FRP syntactic foam configuration CWP test article was developed, constructed, deployed and used for data acquisition in the open ocean near Honolulu, Hawaii. This instrumented CWP was suspended from a moored platform for a three-week experiment in April - May, 1983. The CWP represented a scaled version of a 40-megawatt size structure, nominally 30 feet in diameter and 3000 feet long.