Eigenfunction Matching for a Circular Dock
Contents |
Introduction
We show here a solution for a dock on Finite Depth water, which is circular. This is the three-dimensional analog of the Eigenfunction Matching for a Semi-Infinite Dock.
Governing Equations
We begin with the Frequency Domain Problem.
We will use a cylindrical coordinate system,
,
assumed to have its origin at the centre of the circular
plate which has radius
. The water is assumed to have
constant finite depth
and the
-direction points vertically
upward with the water surface at
and the sea floor at
. The
boundary value problem can therefore be expressed as

We must also apply the Sommerfeld Radiation Condition
as
. The subscript
denotes the derivative in
-direction.
Solution Method
We use separation of variables in the two regions,
and
.
The solution of the problem for the potential in finite water depth can be found by a separation ansatz,
Substituting this into the equation for
yields
The possible separation constants
will be determined by the
free surface condition and the bed condition.
Separation of variables for a free surface
We use separation of variables
We express the potential as
and then Laplace's equation becomes
The separation of variables equation for deriving free surface eigenfunctions is as follows:
subject to the boundary conditions
and
We can then use the boundary condition at
to write
where we have chosen the value of the coefficent so we have unit value at
.
The boundary condition at the free surface (
) gives rise to:

which is the Dispersion Relation for a Free Surface
The above equation is not really the dispersion relation for a free surface, it would be better to refer to it as a transcendental equation. If we solve for all roots in the complex plane we find that the first root is a pair of imaginary roots. We denote the imaginary solutions of this equation by
and
the positive real solutions by
,
. The
of the imaginary solution is the wavenumber. We put the imaginary roots back into the equation above and use the hyperbolic relations
to arrive at the dispersion relation
We note that for a specified frequency
the equation determines the wavenumber
.
Finally we define the function
as
as the vertical eigenfunction of the potential in the open water region. From Sturm-Liouville theory the vertical eigenfunctions are orthogonal. They can be normalised to be orthonormal, but this has no advantages for a numerical implementation. It can be shown that
where
Separation of Variables for a Dock
The separation of variables equation for a floating dock
subject to the boundary conditions
and
The solution is
,
and
We note that
where
Inner product between free surface and dock modes
where

Separation for Cylindrical Coordinates
We now separate variables, noting that since the problem has circular symmetry we can write the potential as
We now solve for the function
.
Using Laplace's equation in polar coordinates we obtain
We can convert this equation to the
standard form by substituting
(provided that
to obtain
The solution of this equation is a linear combination of the
modified Bessel functions of order
,
and
(Abramowitz and Stegun 1964).
Therefore
for some constants
and
Since the solution must be bounded
we know that under the plate the solution will be a linear combination of
while outside the plate the solution will be a
linear combination of
.
The case
is a special case and the solution under
the dock is
.
Therefore the potential can
be expanded as
and
where
and
are the coefficients of the potential in the open water and
the plate covered region respectively.
Incident potential
The incident potential is a wave of amplitude
in displacement travelling in the positive
-direction.
The incident potential can therefore be written as
An infinite dimensional system of equations
The potential and its derivative must be continuous across the
transition from open water to the plate covered region. Therefore, the
potentials and their derivatives at
have to be equal
for each angle and we obtain
and
for each
.
We solve these equations by multiplying both equations by
and integrating from
to
to obtain:
and
Numerical Solution
To solve the system of equations we set the upper limit of
to
be
.
A Simple Method To Calculate The Diffraction Transfer Matrix For The Case Of A Circular Dock
Let's consider an incident wave whose potential has the following expression

Such an incident potential is found in the Kagemoto and Yue Interaction Theory, where it can be written as the sum of an ambient incident potential and the scattered potentials of the other bodies, which are interpretated as incident potentials for the studied body.
We can apply the same eigenfunction matching that previously, considering the potential
and its normal derivative continuous at
. Thus the potential and its normal
derivative expressed at each side of this value of the radius have to be equal. We obtain
the relationships
and
for each
.
We solve these equations with the same method that before, by multiplying both equations by
and integrating from
to
to obtain:
and
The Diffraction Transfer Matrix maps the coefficients of the incident wave with the coefficients of the scattered wave within the open water domain. The relation which links these two coefficients can be written as follows

From the equations (1) and (2)
we can write a linear system of equation, limiting the number of modes of the dispersion equation
to
real ones
for each
.
Therefore we can find a Diffraction Transfer Matrix for each
,
by setting
![\forall i \in [0, N], (D_{pn})_{p \in [0, N]} = \delta_{ip}](/files/math/a/f/e/afe5249ef514ec2a90dd95ce9cf19a41.png)
Then we solve the linear system defined previously, so that we can find the coefficients
for each
.
This vector represents exactly the
column of the Diffraction Transfer Matrix,
being set.
This method permits to obtain the matrix which links the coefficients of the incident and scattered
potential in the free water domain. Applying this for each
, we finally obtain a 3-dimensional
matrix for the Diffraction Transfer Matrix.
Matlab Code
A program to calculate the coefficients for circular dock problems can be found here circle_dock_matching_one_n.m Note that this problem solves only for a single n.
Additional code
This program requires