Semi-Analytical Methods for Different Problems of Diffraction-Radiation by Vertical Circular Cylinders

As in the other fields of mechanics, analytical methods represent an important analysis tool in marine hydrodynamics. The analytical approach is interesting for different reasons : it gives reference results for numerical codes verification, it gives physical insight into some complicated problems, it can be used as a simplified predesign tool, etc. This approach is of course limited to some simplified geometries (cylinders, spheres, ...), and only the case of one or more cylinders, truncated or not, will be considered here. Presented methods are basically eigenfunction expansions whose complexity depends on the boundary conditions. The hydrodynamic boundary value problem (BVP) is formulated within the usual assumptions of potential flow and is additionally simplified by the perturbation method. By using this approach, the highly nonlinear problem decomposes into its linear part and the higher order (second, third, ...) corrections. Also, periodicity is assumed so that the time dependence can be factorized i.e. the frequency domain formulation is adopted. As far as free surface flows are concerned, only cases without or with small forward speed are sufficiently simple to be solved semi-analytically. The problem of the floating body advancing in waves with arbitrary forward speed is far more complicated. These remarks are also valid for the general numerical methods where the case of arbitrary forward speed, even linearized, is still too difficult from numerical point of view, and "it is fair to say that there exists at present no general practical numerical method for the wave resistance problem" [9], and even less for the general seakeeping problem. We note also that, in the case of bluff bodies like cylinders, the assumptions of the potential flow are justified only if the forward speed is less than the product of wave amplitude with wave frequency.