Experimental Investigation of the Radiation Loads of a Heave Plate With Tilt Angle

Installing a heave plate is a practical solution to reduce the responses of a floating system. In the case of a wind turbine, the platform is often tilted by the wind effect on the structure. The paper presents an experimental campaign dedicated to evaluating the effect of the tilt angle on the radiation loads for a free-surface piercing circular cylinder with a circular heave plate. The horizontal and vertical loads are measured by a force transducer mounted on the bottom of a specifically designed beam. Tests in forced surge and forced heave are performed with a plate with a disk-to-column ratio of 2.9 at a single submerged draft with a draft-to-disk ratio of 0.775. The methodology to retrieve added mass and damping from the loads measured in the tests is presented, and some results are given with a specific focus on the effect of the tilt angle on the loads. Some elements are given on how the tilt angle affects the typical hydrodynamic coefficients used in the frequency domain solvers in the presence of heave plates.