Motion Analysis of Articulated Tower

Abstract

An analytical method is developed to study the motions of a rigid articulated tower in waves. The wind, current and waves are assumed colinear. The solution is obtained in a closed form upon linearization of the nonlinear drag term. The analytical results are compared with the tests performed with a tower model in a wave tank. The tower was pivoted with a universal joint near the floor of the tank. The oscillation of the tower in the plane of the waves and the loads at the pin of the universal joint were measured during the test. In all cases the correlations between the theory and experiment are found to be satisfactory.