The effect of bending stiffness on hydroelastic response of VLFS

Owing to the flexibility of ocean structures with large dimension, the hydroelastic theory is more applicable than traditional method of treating the floating structure as a rigid body. To study the factors that influence the hydroelastic responses, a very large floating structure (namely, VLFS) model is chosen to conduct numerical calculations in regular waves with the aid of three dimensional linear hydroelastic code concerning varied bending stiffness and wave frequency. It is found that bending stiffness and wave frequency have a critical but complex influence on relevant hydroelastic results, including generalized displacement, vertical response amplitude and bending moment. More specifically, the effect of bending stiffness on hydroelastic parameters above can be categorized into different phases, and quite different tendencies are observed in each phase.