A study of hydroelastic behavior of hinged VLFS

This paper introduces a new method to study the hydroelastic behavior of hinged Very Large Floating Structures (VLFSs). A hinged two-module structure is used to confirm the present approach. For each module, the hydroelasticity theory proposed by Lu et al. (2016) is adopted to consider the coupled effects of wave dynamics and structural deformation. The continuous condition at the connection position between two adjacent modules is also satisfied. Then the hydroelastic motion equation can be established and numerically solved to obtain the vertical displacement, force and bending moment of the hinged structure. The results calculated by the present new method are compared with those obtained using three-dimensional hydroelasticity theory (Fu et al., 2007), which shows rather good agreement.