Hydrodynamic Interactions Between Submerged Cylinders

Abstract

An approximate method is presented to investigate the hydrodynamic interactions between a pair of free‐standing, bottom‐mounted, flexible circular cylinders subjected to high‐frequency, horizontal ground motion. The cylinders are aligned parallel to the direction of ground excitation and the response of each is assumed to be one‐dimensional and governed by a beam equation. The solution technique for the fluid velocity potential uses the modified plane‐wave method and involves replacing divergent radiated and scat‐ tered waves by equivalent plane waves together with nonplanar correction terms. Numerical results are presented, which illustrate the influence of the various geometrical and material properties of the cylinders on the hydrodynamic loading and associated dynamic response for several pairs of example structures. It is found that the inclusion of fluid compressibility in the formulation leads to predictions of quite significant interactions between squatty cylinders at high frequencies, even at a relatively large spacing.