NUMERICAL STUDY ON THE INTERACTION BETWEEN PERIODIC WAVES AND A FLEXIBLE WALL

Abstract

Coastal structures were usually considered as stiff in the majority of studies related to wave structure interaction I n certain situations, such as impulsive wave loading on flexible breakwaters, ship hulls, tank walls hydroelasticity can be of importance for both wave dynamics and structural responses Akrish et al. (2018) showed that hydroelastic effects can either relax or amplify the hydrodynamic characteristics (i.e., wave run up and force) and structural oscillations in a deformable cantilever wal l interacting with an incident wave group. For flexible coastal defenses, Huang and Li (2022) showed that an elastic horizontal plate breakwater can exhibit a better performance of wave damping than a rigid one. Sree et al. (2021) experimentally investigated a submerged horizontal viscoelastic plate under surface waves. They reported a complete cutoff of the wave energy with the flexible plate. However, the hydroelasticity of a steep fronted structure in nonlinear progressive waves was not yet studied in a de tailed manner , which requires advanced numerical methods for modelling the nonlinear interaction between the fluid and the solid with finite deformations. The present study focus es on the hydroelastic behavior of a flexible vertical wall in nonlinear periodic waves with different wave periods (or frequencies )). The effects of the structural stiffness on the wave evolution and the structural deformation are investigated with a fully coupled wave structure interaction model.