Hydroelastic analysis of pontoon-type circular VLFS with an attached submerged plate

This paper is concerned with the hydroelastic analysis of a pontoon-type, circular, very large floating structure (VLFS) with a horizontal submerged annular plate attached around its perimeter. The coupled fluid–structure interaction problem may be solved by using the modal expansion method in the frequency domain. It involves, firstly, the decomposition of the deflection of a circular Mindlin plate with free edges into vibration modes that are obtained analytically. Then the hydrodynamic diffraction and radiation forces are evaluated by using the eigenfunction expansion matching method which can also be done in an exact manner. The hydroelastic equation of motion is solved by the Rayleigh–Ritz method for the modal amplitudes, and then the modal responses are summed up to obtain the total response. The effectiveness of the attached submerged annular plate in reducing the motion of VLFS has been confirmed by the analysis.