Development of Reduced-Order-Discrete-Module method for hydroelastic analysis of floating flexible structures

The present study proposes a novel method for analyzing the hydroelastic response of floating flexible structures based on Reduced-Order-Discrete-Module (RODM) model. In this model, the floating flexible structure is discretized into a finite number of modules. The hydrodynamic problem is simplified as the interaction between waves and multiple modules. The hydroelastic response is approximated by solving the motion equation of the multibody system, in which the mass and stiffness of the structure are obtained from the reduced-order matrices by the finite element method with a system equivalent reduction expansion process. By using the transformation matrix, the detailed floating structure response can be reconstructed from the multibody dynamics. The validity of the proposed method was demonstrated by comparing the results with the experimental data and other existing methods. The results show that this study has developed an accurate hydroelastic model to analyze the hydroelastic response of floating flexible structures. A module number selection formula is proposed to select the appropriate number of modules based on the exciting force frequency. This model is relatively easy to implement for the hydroelastic problem of interconnection modules and take into account the spatial inhomogeneity of wind/wave field. The proposed model can offer a useful tool for analyzing the hydroelastic response of the offshore floating photovoltaic systems.