Hydroelasticity of ships: recent advances and future trends

Investigations into hydroelasticity of ships commenced in the 1970s. Since then the theory has been employed to predict the responses of a wide range of marine structures, such as mono- and multihulled ships, offshore structures, and VLFS. In recent years, with increasing market demands for new buildings of slender ocean going carriers and the continuously updated high-speed and unconventional multihulled designs, the maritime industry began to notice the advantage of assessing the usefulness and applicability of hydroelasticity in ship design. At first instance, the aim of this paper is to illustrate some of the applications of hydroelasticity theory to ships, with particular reference to recent and ongoing developments focusing on ship design applications and the effects of non-linearities and viscous flows. The paper also discusses the longer term potential use of weakly and fully non-linear fluid structure interaction, as well as Navier-Stokes based fluid dynamic methods, for the improved modelling of ship dynamic response problems.