20-06-2013, 04:40 PM
VERY LARGE FLOATING STRUCTURES (VLFS)
VERY LARGE FLOATING.pdf (Size: 1.18 MB / Downloads: 215)
ABSTRACT
Incoming years, the world is facing new problems such as the lack of land, due to the growing population and fast urban developments. Many developed island countries and countries with long coastlines in need of land have for some time now been successfully reclaiming land from the sea to create new space and, correspondingly, to ease the pressure on their heavily-used land space. In response to the aforementioned needs and problems, researchers and engineers have proposed an interesting and attractive solution the construction of very large floating structures. In recent years, an attractive alternative to land reclamation has emerged – the very large floating structures technology. Japan is the world’s leader in VLFS (Very large floating structures).VLFS can and are already being used for storage facilities, industrial space, bridges, ferry piers, docks, rescue bases, airports, entertainment facilities, military purpose, and even habitation in many countries. In this seminar paper we can discuss about the types of VLFS, Components of VLFS, the advantages, Disadvantages Applications of VLFS in detail. VLFSs can be speedily constructed, exploited, and easily relocated, expanded, or removed.
INTRODUCTION
The total land area of the Earth’s surface is about 148,300,000 square kilometers, while the Earth’s surface area is 510,083,000 square kilometers. Thus, the main part of the Earth’s surface is covered by sea, lakes, rivers, etc, which takes up 70 percent of the Earth’s total surface area. Therefore, the land that we lived on forms only 30% of the Earth’s surface. A large part of the Earth, which is the ocean, remains unexploited.
VLFSs can be constructed to create floating airports, bridges, breakwaters, piers and docks, storage facilities (for oil), wind or solar power plants, for military purposes, industrial space, emergency bases, entertainment facilities, recreation parks, space-vehicle launching, mobile offshore structures and even habitation (it could become reality sooner than one may expect). In certain applications of VLFS such as floating airports, floating container terminals and floating dormitories where high loads are placed in certain parts of the floating structure, the resulting differential deflections can be somewhat large and may render certain equipment non operational. Therefore, it is important to reduce the differential deflection in VLFS.
COMPONENTS IN VLFS
2. an access bridge or a floating road to get to the floating structure from shore,
3. a mooring facility or station keeping system to keep the floating structure in the specified place, and
4. a breakwater, (usually needed if the significant wave height is greater than 4 m) which can be floating as well, or anti-heaving device for reducing wave forces impacting the floating structure
5. structures, facilities and communications located on a VLFS.