An Improved Approach for Interaction of Wave with Floating Spheres and Its Applications

To develop and utilize marine resources in the deep sea, the higher requirements for floating structures, which are operated in marine environment for a long term, have been put forward. Reasonable structure type and accurate force analysis are favorable guarantees to improve the survival performance and working performance of the floating structures. Floating spheres fastened by mooring cable were widely used in floating structures. In this paper, the wave forces of the floating sphere are efficiently and accurately calculated by solving the geometric relationship between the non-submerged floating sphere and wave surface. Combined with the hydrodynamic calculation of mooring cables based on the lumped mass method, the coupled motion model of multi-floating spheres fastened by multi-mooring cable was established under wave action. Furthermore, according to the floating structures fastened by mooring cable in the actual ocean engineering, the topological method of multi-mooring cables fastening the multifloating spheres was expounded from simple to complex. Finally, the modeling method and preliminarily hydrodynamic characteristics of the fastened floating structures, including the mooring system of renewable energy devices, ocean buoy, and coral nursery, were presented and analyzed in detail. The obtained results showed that the method for calculating the wave force on the floating sphere developed in this paper can accurately describe the motion process of the floating mooring sphere and the force on the mooring cable. Also, the topological method of multiple buoys and multiple mooring cables could efficiently establish various numerical hydrodynamic models of fastened buoys in ocean engineering.