Very Large Floating Structures (VLFS) have received considerable attention recently. Efficient and accurate estimation of their hydroelastic responses in waves is very important for the design. The most efficient approach would obviously be the analytical one. Within the category of analytical approaches, the simplified method proposed by Ohkusu and his colleague are of special characteristics. However, when one stndies their methods, several questions arise. The purpose of this paper is to critically study the simplified methods proposed by Ohkusu and his colleague in order to answer these questions. Some problems in their original methods have been found and possible improvements are suggested. It is concluded that the improved simplified method using the same idea of Ohkusu and his colleague could provide a reasonable estimate of the hydroelastic response of mat-like VLFS in a certain range of incident angles of waves.
The application of very large floating structure (VLFS) to the utilization of ocean space and exploitation of ocean resources has become one of the issues of great interest in international ocean engineering field. Owing to the advantage of simplicity in structure and low cost of construction and maintenance, box-type VLFS can be used in the calm water area near the coast as the structure configuration of floating airport. In this paper, a 3D linear hydroelastic theory is used to study the dynamic response of box-type VLFS in sinusoidal regular waves. A beam model and a 3D FEM model are respectively employed to describe the dynamic characteristics of the box-type structure in vacuum. A hydrodynamic model (3D potential theory of flexible body) is applied to investigate the effect of different dry models on the hydroelastic response of box-type structure. Based on the calculation of hydroelastic response in regular waves, the rigid body motion displacement, flexible deflection, and the short term and long term wave induced bending moments are also predicted.
A new hybrid method of frequency domain and time domain is developed in this paper to predict the motion responses of a flexibly joint multi- body floating system to irregular waves. The main idea of the method is that the three-dimensional frequency method is used to obtain the hydrodynamic coefficients and the response equations are solved in time domain step by step. All the forces can be obtained at the same time. The motions and nonlinear mooring forces of a box type six-body floating system are predicted. A comparison of the theoretical method-based solutions with experimental results has shown good agreement.
