A feasibility analysis of a floating pier

Abstract

Operability of a floating pier is investigated by analyzing inclination of the floating pier due to movement of cargos and cranes, motion response of a ship due to the neighboring floating pier. Assurance of survivability under harsh environmental conditions is a more important design concern to show usefulness of a floating pier, a simplified frequency-domain analysis and a time domain transient analysis are applied to evaluate mooring performance of the floating pier. A HOBEM (Higher-Order Boundary Element Method) is applied to frequency-domain analysis considering multi-body hydrodynamic interactions. FEM (Finite Element Method) is employed to investigate transient response due to very steep incident wave caused typhoon or tsunami. Copyright ？ 2006 by The International Society of Offshore and Polar Engineers.