HERONS: HydroElastic Responses of nONlinear Structures

In recent years, offshore structures are becoming increasingly important.  For example, offshore wind infrastructure is already developing at a rapid rate to cope with the demand for green energy, while large floating structures that serve as fully functional offshore airports, solar farms and even habitations are on the horizon. Moreover, increasing demands for global maritime trade, along with targets to reduce worldwide C02 emissions, drives the need for larger, lighter, and faster ships. This results in nonlinear marine structures that exhibit complex wave-induced dynamic responses.  

The study of flexible marine structures in the ocean environment is called hydroelasticity. In recent years, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element analysis (FEA), have advanced our ability to accurately model nonlinear physical phenomena associated with marine hydroelasticity. However, state-of-the-art CFD-FEA analyses typically incur a significant computational cost, with time-domain simulations that can run for days to produce predictions of only a few seconds. As a result, an undesirable trade-off often emerges between computational efficiency and accuracy of the solution. 

A promising approach involves borrowing well-established concepts from linear structural dynamics to assist in addressing the computational challenges in modelling nonlinearities in marine hydroelasticity. In particular, extensions of modal decomposition and frequency response functions, which facilitate highly efficient computations for linear structures, are expected to provide a versatile and efficient framework to model and compute nonlinear structural behaviour.