Research of gravity foundation

• Main Author: Barati, Paraham
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Uppsala universitet, Elektricitetslära 2010
• Subjects: hydro dynamics
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-126585

The material consumption of the foundation of a WEC is a big part of the totalmaterial consumption of the entire power plant. To reduce these consumption, it isrequired to optimize the foundation. To find out how small the foundation could beconstructed and still be able to cope with the requirements, it is necessary to knowabout the various forces that affects the foundation. The focus in this thesis is on theforces acting on the buoy. The forces are calculated theoretical with experimentsconducted to reach conclusions about the size of the gravity foundation.Experiments will also be conducted to investigate experimentally whether there is anydifference between the suction force of sand and clay soil.Results from experiments with buoys show that the theoretical calculations arereasonably close with results from experiments. Conclusion of the differencesbetween theory and experiment is found that this may be due to the wave tank abilityto reproduce waves, and the angle between the buoy and the wave direction.Results from experiments of the suction force shows that there is no differencebetween sand and clay. The conclusion from this experiment is that the results applyonly to the clay that was investigated in this experiment and cannot be compared withother clay types with different properties.A discussion about the foundations is carried out where the conclusion is drawn thatthe foundations for the minimum mass to maintain equilibrium at 4 m wave height isapproximately 33 ton.