Towing & Stabilisation

TOWING & STABILISATION

• When towing large buoyant objects out to sea, it is very common for a large ocean-going tug to provide the pulling power, with two or more complementary harbour tugs to provide the directional control and stability. • When stabilising large, heavy objects that have a tendency to move drastically, it is often necessary to absorb the force of that motion gradually, rather than trying to stop it abruptly, as this would incur tremendous impact forces and hence fracture the support structures involved. This movement must of course also be dampened so as to reduce the effect of repeated oscillation.

• This information will of course influence our thought-process when it comes tointegrating certain features into the design of our solution, with particular relevance to the floatation device and how we go about towing it out to location. For example, our attention has now been drawn to the need for substantial damping pistons with which to control the articulation of the pontoon, as well as the need for providing three separate towing points, by the information gained in this section.

So, after a long week of internet-browsing and perusing through various books, needless to say we were beginning to feel a little like sponges! On the plus side, we certainly benefitedfrom a significantly better understanding of our direction within this project, and armed with all this technical information we had managed to obtain, we were then ableto clarify what exactly our initial specification wanted of us.

HARBOUR TUG Source: www.maritiemjournal.com Retrieved: April 1st 2012