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F. Toth, M. Kaltenbacher, F. G. Rammerstorfer:
"Modelling of Air Chamber Supported Floating Platforms - Coupling Free Surface Flow, Compressible Air, and Flexible Structures";
Talk: VI International Conference on Coupled Problems in Science and Engineering, Venedig; 05-18-2015 - 05-20-2015; in: "Coupled Problems in Science and Engineering", B.A. Schrefler, E. Oñate, M. Papadrakakis (ed.); CIMNE, Barcelona, Spanien (2015), ISBN: 978-84-943928-3-2; 346 - 357.

Air chamber supported floating platforms can significantly decrease wave induced structural responses. Novel applications, like floating arrays of solar collectors, with low payload requirements allow the design of floating platforms supported by large, cylindrical air chambers made of highly flexible membranes. In order to predict the dynamics of such systems a modelling strategy capturing all important phenomena: incompressible free surface flow, compressible air and flexible structures is presented. The governing partial differential equations and boundary conditions are given in their linearised form, and subsequently solved by the finite element method. A frequency domain formulation is chosen to compute the steady state response to harmonic excitation. In order to handle problems in unbounded domains a perfectly matched layer formulation is used. Thereby, radiating waves are efficiently damped at the edge of the computational domain. For the sake of simplicity we present two-dimensional, test problems used for the validation of the developed modelling strategy. Finally, we present a fully coupled simulation of wave interactions with a flexible, air chamber supported floating platform.