Accelerated Higher Order Boundary Element Method for Wave Diffraction/Radiation Problems and Its Applications

This paper presents an accelerated higher order boundary element method for wave diffraction/radiation problems and its applications, especially for wave response analysis of VLFS (Very Large Floating Structures). The Fast Multipole Method (FMM) has been implemented on the higher order boundary element code using 8-node quadrilateral element. The method utilizes an iterative solver, multipole expansion of Green’s function, and hierarchical algorithm using quadrant-tree. For solving hydroelastic problem efficiently using iterative solver, a new algorithm, where the equations of motions representing plate vibration are solved at each iterative step, has been introduced. The numerical benchmark calculations have shown the efficiency of the method both in storage requirement of O(N) and computation time of O(N log N), where N is the number of unknowns for the velocity potential.