Hydroelastic response of a mat-type, floating runway near a breakwater in irregular seas

A wall-sided shallow rectangular shape is usually considered for floating runways in relatively sheltered locations. The Mega-Float project of Japan is an example to this. Such very large floating structures (VLFS) will be quite flexible under wave action and thus they must be protected by breakwaters. In OCEANS ´98 conference, a new approach which is based on the Green-Naghdi theory, was proposed to determine the dynamic response of a floating runway in the absence of a shoreline or breakwater. The new method was used during a parametric study of a mat-type runway, and it was shown to be much more efficient than other numerical methods routinely used to study the dynamics of conventional-sized offshore structures. The authors extend the study of the same problem by including the presence of a breakwater, and to irregular seas defined by a spectral formula. They also refine the numerical model that was used before. The numerical efficiency is improved further by adopting the eigenfunction expansion method. Using this improved model, the response amplitude operators and motion response spectra of the runway displacement are obtained in the presence of a breakwater and in long-crested random seas