On the estimation method of hydrodynamic forces acting on a very large floating structure

The floating structures that may be used for such purposes as an international airport or an offshore city are expected to be as large as several kilometers long and wide. For the estimation of hydrodynamic forces due to waves or motions that will act on such huge structures, a direct application of conventional numerical methods is practically prohibitive, because the required computational burden is enormous. In order to avoid this difficulty, an approximate method is developed in which computational time is drastically reduced without appreciable loss of accuracy. Although a direct application of conventional numerical methods is difficult for the reason that the corresponding structure is so large, the method proposed in this paper exploits the very fact that a structure is very large to simplify the calculation. The effectiveness of the new method is demonstrated in comparisons with results obtained by the direct application of a conventional numerical method.