Hydroelastic analysis of floating plates with multiple hinge connections in regular waves

In this study, we propose a numerical procedure to analyze floating plate structures with multiple hinge connections in regular waves and investigate the maximum bending moment and deflection in the plate structures. The directly coupled equations of motion for the hydroelastic analysis are discretized by the boundary element method for fluid and the finite element method for plates. The hinge connection is modeled by releasing the rotational degrees of freedom of the plate finite elements, in which a complete condensation procedure is used considering structural mass and stiffness and fluid-structure interaction terms. Wave tank experiments have been performed to verify the numerical results. The modeling capability of the proposed numerical procedure is demonstrated through floating plate problems with 1- and 2-directional multiple hinge connections. The numerical analyses show the effect of the number of hinge connections used on the maximum bending moment and deflection of the floating plate structures according to the aspect ratio, bending stiffness and incident wavelength. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.