Radiation of water waves by a heaving submerged horizontal disc

Abstract

A thin rigid plate is submerged beneath the free surface of deep water. The plate performs small-amplitude oscillations. The problem of calculating the radiated waves can be reduced to solving a hypersingular boundary integral equation. In the special case of a horizontal circular plate, this equation can be reduced further to one-dimensional Fredholm integral equations of the second kind. If the plate is heaving, the problem becomes axisymmetric, and the resulting integral equation has a very simple structure; it is a generalization of Love's integral equation for the electrostatic field of a parallel-plate capacitor. Numerical solutions of the new integral equation are presented. It is found that the added-mass coefficient becomes negative for a range of frequencies when the disc is sufficiently close to the free surface.