Cj. Garrison, A NUMERICALLY EFFICIENT METHOD FOR ANALYSIS OF VERY LARGE ARTICULATEDFLOATING STRUCTURES, Journal of ship research, 42(3), 1998, pp. 174-186
A method is presented for evaluation of the motion of long structures
composed of interconnected barges, or modules, of arbitrary shape. Suc
h structures are being proposed in the construction of offshore airpor
ts or other large offshore floating structures. It is known that the e
valuation of the motion of jointed or otherwise interconnected modules
which make up a long floating structure may be evaluated by three dim
ensional radiation/diffraction analysis. However, the computing effort
increases rapidly as the complexity of the geometric shape of the ind
ividual modules and the total number of modules increases. This paper
describes an approximate method which drastically reduces the computat
ional effort without major effects on accuracy. The method relies on a
ccounting for hydrodynamic interaction effects between only adjacent m
odules within the structure rather than between all of the modules sin
ce the near-field interaction is by far the more important. This appro
ximation reduces the computational effort to that of solving the two-m
odule problem regardless of the total number of modules in the complet
e structure.