New Moonpool Design of Drillship for Operability Improvement

This study suggests three different designs of the moonpool to reduce the internal flow of the moonpool. The experimental and numerical studies were performed to improve the dillship's operability by the flow reduction in the moonpool. Based on the previous result of model tests in two-dimensional (2D) wave flume, three different moonpool designs were proposed: design-1: combination of forward recess deck, vertical bulkhead and beach-type wave absorber; design-2: a step-type forward recess deck; and design-3: a forward recess deck with beach-type wave absorber. Experimental study was carried out in the Offshore Engineering Basin for 87 K compact drillship which was 87,000 Mt as design gross tonnage. To verify the experimental results and clearly understand the internal flow of the drillship's moonpool, numerical study was carried out using Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. From these studies, it was found that all the proposed designs showed significantly reduced internal flow at resonance frequency compared to the original moonpool design of the target drillship, although the characteristic of internal flow reduction was different for each moonpool design. Additional studies were carried out to obtain the improved moonpool design that is expected to further reduce the internal flow of moonpool through CFD. Based on the results of three moonpool designs, the combined one with the step-type recess deck and the wave absorber presents best performance in the viewpoint of flow reduction in the moonpool.