SLAMMING AND WATER SHIPPING ON A VLFS WITH SHALLOW DRAFT

Floating airports consisting of barge-type Very Large Floating Structures (VLFS) have been proposed in Japan and extensively investigated by linear hydroelastic theory. Though in practical cases both bottom slamming and green water should be of concern, there are limited studies available, i.e. [9] and [6]. In the following, a two-dimensional fully- nonlinear wave tank, solved numerically by BEM, is applied to green water and bottom slamming on a restrained VLFS with shallow draft. A local analytical solution is introduced to cope with small angles between impacting free surface and bottom. Air cushions appearing during bottom events are dealt with by assuming quasi-steady adiabatic evolution of the entrapped air.