SCALED BOUNDARY FINITE ELEMENT SOLUTION OF WAVE DIFFRACTION BY A VERTICAL CIRCULAR CYLINDER

Accurate prediction of wave forces acting on offshore structures is important for their design. The vertical circular cylinder is the common hull form in many offshore platforms. For relatively large cylinders wave forces are predicted by diffraction theory, whose boundary value problem (BVP) can be solved analytically or numerically. Experimental results [1] confirmed the analytical solution [2] for diffraction parameters less than 3. In that range, accurate numerical results have been obtained by various numerical methods such as finite element method (FEM) [3], boundary element method (BEM) [4] and scaled boundary finite element method (SBFEM) [5].In this article, by using the scaled boundary FEM, velocity potential, wave run-up and wave excitation force per unit length are calculated and compared with the analytical results.