Experimental investigation of wave forces on net structures

The large growth of the aquaculture industry necessitates and motivates the use of offshore locations for fish farming. New technologies, such as structures that are compliant with the high energy of the open ocean, will be required. Design and development of such structures will depend upon numerical tools that can simulate and predict the structural response in specific offshore sea states. The understanding of hydrodynamic loads on nets is a necessary basis for applying such tools. The numerical tools also need to be validated using the results of laboratory measurements. This paper presents laboratory measurements of forces on three different net panels exposed to five different regular wave cases. The measurements are also compared with simulations using three different load numerical models.