A Study on the Hydrostatic Mooring Stability of Submerged Floating Ellipsoidal Habitats

Underwater architecture in providing a comfortable living space underwater is mandated to survive prevailing environmental loads, especially hydrostatic ambient water pressure exerted on the structure of individual habitat hulls at depth and hydrodynamic fluctuation of external forces that perturb the postural equilibrium and mooring stability of the underwater housing system, for which the design including the hull shape and mooring system constraint the responses. In this study, the postural stability of a proposed underwater floating housing system with three vertically connected ellipsoidal-shape habitat hulls of different sizes are theorized and calculated for hydrostatic stability, using MATLAB in the volumetric integration of a hull and the weight of operational loads under assumed scenarios. The assumptions made in the numerical method to estimate the stability of the habitat system include the fixed weight of the hulls, and their adjustable loads within operational limits for the set meteorological oceanic conditions. The purpose of this study was to numerically manipulate a) The buoyancy and b) The adjusted center of mass of the system within the range of designed external and internal load changes, by which the effective mooring system capability and postural equilibrium requirements were argued with the quantitative analysis