• Journal of the Society of Naval Architects of Korea
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• v.30 no.1
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• pp.65-72
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• 1993

A numerical method for nonlinear free-surface-wave problem is developed in this paper. The final goal of this study is to simulate the towing tank experiment of a ship model and to partially replace the experiment by the numerical model. The exact problem in the scope of potential flow theory is formulated by a variational principle based on the classical Hamilton's principle. A localized finite element method is used in the present numerical computations which made use of the following two notable steps. The first step is an efficient treatment of the numerical radiation condition by using the intermediate nonlinear-to-linear transition buffer subdomain between the fully nonlinear and linear subdomains. The second is the use of a modal analysis in the final stage of the solution procedures, which enables us to reduce the computation time drastically. With these improvements the present method can treat a much larger computational domain than that was possible previously. A pressure patch on the free surface was chosen as an example. From the present computed results we could investigate the effect of nonlinearity on the down-stream wave pattern more clearly than others, because much larger computational domain was treated. We found, specifically, the widening of the Kelvin angle and the increase of the wave numbers and the magnitude of wave profiles.