Two Identical Docks using Symmetry
Contents |
Introduction
The problems consists three regions with a free surface and and two regions of identical length with a rigid surface through which not flow is possible. The solution method is an extension of Eigenfunction Matching for a Finite Dock using Symmetry in Two Dimensions. We begin with the simple problem when the waves are normally incident (so that the problem is truly two-dimensional). We then consider the case when the waves are incident at an angle. For the later we give the equations in slightly less detail.
Governing Equations
We begin with the Frequency Domain Problem for a dock which occupies
the region
(we assume
time dependence).
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

where we require
and we define
(so that the dock also has length
).
We must also apply the Sommerfeld Radiation Condition
as
. This essentially implies
that the only wave at infinity is propagating away and at negative infinity there is a unit incident wave
and a wave propagating away.
Solution Method
We begin by separating variables in the different regions.
We express the potential as
and then Laplace's equation becomes
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

Incident potential
To create meaningful solutions of the velocity potential
in the specified domains we add an incident wave term to the expansion for the domain of
above. The incident potential is a wave of amplitude
in displacement travelling in the positive
-direction. We would only see this in the time domain
however, in the frequency domain the incident potential can be written as
The total velocity (scattered) potential now becomes
for the domain of
.
The first term in the expansion of the diffracted potential for the domain
is given by
which represents the reflected wave.
In any scattering problem
where
and
are the reflection and transmission coefficients respectively. In our case of the semi-infinite dock
and
as there are no transmitted waves in the region under the dock.
Expansion of the potential
The solution method uses Symmetry in Two Dimensions and we write the potential as
a symmetric and an anti-symmetric part and consider only the region
. We apply
either Neuman (symmetric) or Dirichlet (anti-symmetric) boundary conditions at
.
We separation of variables in the three regions, similar to
as for the Eigenfunction Matching for a Finite Dock. We being with the symmetric potential which can
be expanded as
and
where
and
are the coefficients of the potential in the open water regions to the
left and right and
and
are the coefficients under the dock.
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
and
have to be equal.
We obtain
We solve these equations by multiplying both equations by
and integrating from
to
to obtain:
Numerical Solution
To solve the system of equations we set the upper limit of
to
be
. We then simply need to solve the linear system of equations.
Anti-Symmetric Solution
The solution for the anti-symmetric potential proceeds in an almost identical manner.
and
where
and
are the coefficients of the potential in the open water regions to the
left and right and
and
are the coefficients under the dock.
We solve these equations by multiplying both equations by
and integrating from
to
to obtain:
Solution with Waves Incident at an Angle
We can consider the problem when the waves are incident at an angle
. In some
ways the solution is now simpler because we do not need to write the zero term separately
under the dock.
When a wave in incident at an angle
we have the wavenumber in the
direction is
where
is as defined previously (note that
is imaginary).
This means that the potential is now of the form
so that when we separate variables we obtain
where
is the separation constant calculated without an incident angle.
This means that the potential is now of the form
.
Therefore the symmetric potential can
be expanded as
where
and
and we always take the positive real root or the root with positive imaginary part.
We solve these equations by multiplying both equations by
and integrating from
to
to obtain:
and these are solved exactly as before. The solution for the anti-symmetric potential is found in a similar fashion.
Matlab Code
A program to calculate the coefficients for the finite dock problems can be found here two_finite_docks_symmetry.m
Additional code
This program requires