Wave scattering by a floating porous elastic plate of arbitrary shape: A semi-analytical study

In this paper, a semi-analytical model based on linear potential flow theory and an eigenfunction expansion method is developed to study wave scattering by a porous elastic plate with arbitrary shape floating in water of finite depth. The water domain is divided into the interior and exterior regions, corresponding to the domain beneath the plate and the rest extending towards infinite distance horizontally, respectively. The unknown coefficients in the potential expressions are determined by satisfying the continuity conditions for pressure and velocity at the interface of the two regions, together with the conditions for the motion/force at the edge of the plate, where the Fourier series expansion method is employed to deal with the terms associated with the radius function. A plate with three shapes – circular, cosine and elliptical – and three edge conditions are considered. We find that the largest deflection of the plate with a simply supported edge and a clamped edge is more sensitive to the change in porosity when the porosity is small. The power dissipated by an elliptical plate with its major axis perpendicular to the incident wave direction is the largest among the case studies for the majority of the porosity values tested.