On the dynamics of floating structures

Abstract

This paper addresses the floating body problem which consists in studying the interaction of surface water waves with a floating body. We propose a new formulation of the water waves problem that can easily be generalized in order to take into account the presence of a floating body. The resulting equations have a compressible-incompressible structure in which the interior pressure exerted by the fluid on the floating body is a Lagrange multiplier that can be determined through the resolution of a $d$-dimensional elliptic equation, where $d$ is the horizontal dimension. In the case where the object is freely floating, we decompose the hydrodynamic force and torque exerted by the fluid on the solid in order to exhibit an added mass effect; in the one dimensional case $d=1$, the computations can be carried out explicitly. We also show that this approach in which the interior pressure appears as a Lagrange multiplier can be implemented on reduced asymptotic models such as the nonlinear shallow water equations and the Boussinesq equations; we also show that it can be transposed to the discrete version of these reduced models and propose simple numerical schemes in the one dimensional case. We finally present several numerical computations based on these numerical schemes; in order to validate these computations we exhibit explicit solutions in some particular configurations such as the return to equilibrium problem in which an object is dropped from a non-equilibrium position in a fluid which is initially at rest.