Theoretical Study on Hydroelastic Responses of Very Large Floating Structures Near Islands and Reefs

In order to explore the fishery, oil and gas, and tourism resources in the ocean, Very Large Floating Structures (VLFS) can be deployed near islands and reefs as a logistic base with various functions such as a floating harbor, accommodation, fishery processing, oil and gas exploration, environment surveillance, airplane landing and taking off, etc. However, in addition to the complicated hydroelastic coupling effects between the hydrodynamic loads and structural dynamic responses, when tackling the hydroelastic problems of floating structures deployed near islands and reefs, several other environmental effects and numerical techniques should be taken into account: 1) The influences of the non-uniform incident waves (multi-directions, different wave frequencies); 2) Complex seabed profile and its impact on the incident waves; 3) Nonlinear second order wave exciting forces in the complex mooring system, shallow water and coral reef geological conditions; 4) Parallel computing technology and fast solving methods for the large scale linear equations, accounting for the influence of dramatic increase of number of meshes to the computation efforts and efficiency. In the present paper the theoretical investigation on the hydroelastic responses of VLFS deployed near islands and reefs has been presented. In addition, based on the pulsating source Green function, the high performance parallel fast computing techniques and other numerical methods, in solving large scale linear equations, have been introduced in the three-dimensional hydroelastic analysis package THAFTS. The motions, wave loads, distortions and stresses can be calculated using the present theoretical model and the results can be used in the design and safety assessment of VLFS.