Time domain springing analysis on a floating barge under oblique wave

Abstract

This paper studies the springing response of a flexible floating barge under an oblique wave. A time domain Rankine panel method was used to represent fluid motion surrounding a flexible seagoing vessel, and a finite element method was used for structural response. For accurate prediction of the structural response under an oblique wave, special attention was given to the structural model, such as the effect of warping distortion and bending-torsion coupling. The Vlasov assumption was followed for a deformable beam element to take into account the effect of warping distortion so that the cross section of the beam deforms out of its original plane without changing its cross-section contour. The coupled equation for both the fluid and structural domain was solved by using the implicit iterative method. A fixed point iteration with a relaxation scheme was employed in this study with the aid of the Aitken δ2 process seeking acceleration of solution convergence. Accuracy of a developed computer program was verified through the comparison with experimental work done by Remy et al. (Experimental and numerical study of the wave response of a flexible barge, Hydroelasticity in Marine Technology, Wuxi, 2006) resulting in good correspondence between the two results.