Viscous-flow-based investigation of Cloaking phenomenon among multi-floating bodies and experimental verification

Abstract

The safety of mooring systems on offshore platforms seems more and more significant with the utilization of offshore space and resources, so the reduction of wave drift force is the key issue in this wave-body interaction problem. The wave drift force acting on the inner floating body surrounded by multiple small floating bodies can be reduced obviously with the occurrence of a phenomenon, which is called the Cloaking phenomenon. The Cloaking phenomenon refers to the reduction or complete elimination in amplitude of the scattered waves. In this paper, a real-coded genetic algorithm was used to optimize the parameters of outer floating bodies to minimize the scattered wave energy, and then the wave drift force acting on the inner body can be reduced. Furthermore, associated CFD simulations and experimental research were conducted with the above optimized parameters to investigate and verify the Cloaking phenomenon more systemically. It is shown that the wave drift force acting on the inner floating body in the Cloaking configuration can be reduced obviously both in numerical and experimental research, and the reduction of the wave drift force is closely related to the change of wave field around the structure.