A generalized adaptive mesh pressure integration technique applied to progressive flooding of floating bodies in still water

•A new numerical scheme for modelling the flooding of floating objects is presented.•A pressure integration technique with exact integral formulations is applied.•Polyhedral intersection and quad-tree adaptive meshing schemes are used.•Comparisons with experiments and other methods are carried out for a barge model.

A new time domain numerical scheme is presented, which can be applied to model the flooding of any floating object such as ships, offshore structures, pontoons or Very Large Floating Structures (VLFS). The generic nature of the input process regarding geometric, mass and inter-compartment openings characteristics, gives way to straightforward pre-processing procedures and flexible simulations. The proposed code architecture makes it ideal for parametric damage studies required for reliability assessments or for compartment connections optimization studies. The developed code is based on the pressure integration technique evaluated at unstructured meshes composed of quadrilaterals. Polyhedral and polygonal intersection algorithms work together with a quad-tree mesh subdivision and cutting adaptive process to become the kernel of the domain setup and intra-simulation dynamic modification, on which analytic formulations of pressure calculations are evaluated. Comparisons with model experimental results and with other codes are presented regarding the progressive flooding of a box-shaped barge in still water.