ON THE ESTIMATION METHOD OF HYDRODYNAMIC-FORCES ACTING ON A VERY LARGE FLOATING STRUCTURE

The floating structures that may be used for such purposes as an inter national airport or an offshore city are expected to be as large as se veral kilometers long and wide. For the estimation of hydrodynamic for ces due to waves or notions that will act on such huge structures, a d irect application of conventional numerical methods is practically pro hibitive, because the required computational burden is enormous. In or der to avoid this difficulty, an approximate method is developed in wh ich computational time is drastically reduced without appreciable loss of accuracy. Although a direct application of conventional numerical methods is difficult for the reason that the corresponding structure i s so large, the method proposed in this paper exploits the very fact t hat a structure is very large to simplify the calculation. The effecti veness of the new method is demonstrated in comparisons with results o btained by the direct application of a conventional numerical method. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Limited.