Hydroelastic impact of a wedge-shaped body

In this paper a hydroelastic method for the design of marine structures is used to study the impact of a wedge-shaped body onto a calm free-surface. The method combines computational fluid dynamics and dynamic finite-element techniques to predict the hydroelastic response of a structure in the time domain. The basic idea of the method is to predict the stress field on the fluid-structure interface due to rigid-body impact, and then to transfer the information to a wet modal model. The one-way transfer of information from the fluid simulation to the structure has two important advantages with respect to a fully coupled simulation: a single rigid-body motion computation can be reused for subsequent analyses after the structure has been redesigned, and cost of the fluid dynamic simulation is not increased due to iteration which is required in coupled simulations. The maximum displacement of an elastic wedge during the impact and penetration stages are compared with published results from a fully coupled theoretical model and a fully coupled numerical solver. The present method requires approximation of the flexural added mass, and the comparison with other results shows that the approximation is satisfactory for predicting maximum displacement.