Hydroelastic Analysis of Floating Plates Subjected to Moving Loads in Shallow Water Condition by Using the Moving Element Method

Abstract

In this paper, the moving element method (MEM) is developed to compute the hydroelastic response of a pontoon type very large floating structure (VLFS) in shallow water environment and subjected to a moving load. By using this method, the floating plate is modeled via the thin plate theory, while the linearized shallow-water equation is employed for the hydrodynamic modeling. Both computational domains of fluid and structure are concurrently discretized into “moving elements” whose coordinate system moves along with applied loads. The numerical results conducted by using the MEM are compared with the results obtained by alternative approaches. The paper also discusses the effect of water depth on the dynamic amplification factor of plate displacement and the loading’s critical speed.