Small Barge Design Plans

I am a senior at Texas A&M University at Galveston in the Maritime Systems Engineering department. Currently, I am working on my senior design project and need help with the design of a barge to support a portable floating in-stream tidal generation device. The rough barge dimensions are 14mx12mx2m. Any help would be great, all information is for educational purposes only and will not be used in industry or for actual construction.

Thanks!

 

Do you have specs or a description on just how the device is going to work? Do you need a solid full hull barge, or would more of a pontoon system to either side of the device work better? Lowering it through the deck if it has to go into the water sounds safer and less issues with tipping than lowering something over an edge.

 

Can you be more specific with "help"...?

such as: weights, hydrodynamics, structures, resistance, SOR etc etc..

 

As noted above, you don't provide enough information. However, given that your primary goal, if I understand correctly, is to generate electricity based on rise and fall of tides, then you need to anchor to the substrate in some fashion for greatest efficiency. The best solution here would be to use spud bars, preferably hydraulic, to anchor the barge in place. Then you can implement the generating device to take full advantage of tide changes.

Essentially, you need to build the generator first as if it were a stationary object. Then fit it to the barge. The spud bars will give you the stationary effect along with the portability of the barge. I hope that made some sense...

 

The generator is already designed, it is an open-center turbine 6m in diameter that will be suspended from the bottom of the barge. Right now the idea is to have a "moon pool" in the center of the barge to raise and lower the turbine though with motors so it will not have to go over the side and is easily accessed for maintenance. The barge will be weighted down since the area it will be located is all Tuff Breccia (bed rock)
The help needed is the actual designing of the barge, mainly the internal support methods and layout.
I have access to several analysis programs: Algor, HECSALV, Pro/E, Sesam, and Orcaflex.

 

If it is just internal supports, for machinery/equipment etc, then if you are a senior (not 100% sure what that means), it should be a straight forward beam theory problem. No need for FEA etc. The support being either between frames or WTBs.

As for a layout, start off by drawing the hull outline in plan and profile at a scale, then get the "bits" you need, to scale, and see if you can place them where you reckon they are needed. Then do a simple weight and centres check, for LCG/TCG. For your project, that should be suffice, since you're not actually designing it, save for understanding the methodology.

 

We are required to do FEA, a hydro analysis, and a stability analysis.

 

Seems a strange overkill to use FEA for a simple beam analysis. What you could do, is model the whole hull...just roughly, and apply a load case calculated from your hydrodynamic analysis of potenial wave loads etc. During the right moments when deployed, apply that to your stability model.

 

If you are going to do stress analysis on the structure and stability on the hull using your software you will need a 3D model of the hull. So how about you provide an image here so I have a better idea what you are talking about.

You will need to determine the forces on the hull. If you have the turbine designed then you should have already determined the turbine drag. Other major forces are buoyancy and drag/anchoring. Maybe also windage depending on the location. What peak tidal flow with the barge be intended to operate in?

I expect a catamaran type arrangement of the hull with a bridge structure will result in the lowest drag and provide simple hull design.


Rick W