On the coupled time-harmonic motion of deep water and a freely floating body: trapped modes and uniqueness theorems

Abstract

AbstractWe investigate the time-harmonic small-amplitude motion of the mechanical system that consists of water and a body freely floating in it; water occupies a half-space, whereas the body is either surface-piercing or totally submerged. As a mathematical model of this coupled motion, we consider a spectral problem (the spectral parameter is the frequency of oscillations), for which the following results are obtained. The total energy of the water motion is finite and the equipartition of energy holds for the whole system. For any value of frequency, infinitely many eigensolutions are constructed and each of them consists of a non-trivial velocity potential and the zero vector describing the motion of the body; the latter means that trapping bodies (infinitely many of them are found) are motionless although they float freely. They are surface-piercing, have axisymmetric submerged parts and are obtained by virtue of the so-called semi-inverse procedure. We also prove that certain restrictions on the body geometry (which are violated for the constructed trapping bodies) guarantee that the problem has only a trivial solution for frequencies that are sufficiently large being measured in terms of a certain dimensionless quantity.