Benchmark hydroelastic responses of a circular VLFS under wave action

This paper is concerned with the hydroelastic analysis of a pontoon-type circular very large floating structure (VLFS). 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 which can be obtained in an exact manner. Then the hydrodynamic diffraction and radiation forces are evaluated by using eigenfunction expansion matching method that is also 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 very accurate deflections and stress-resultants of uniform circular VLFSs presented herein are valuable as they serve as benchmark solutions to check the numerical methods for hydroelastic analysis of VLFSs.