Water wave trapping in a long array of bottomless circular cylinders

This study tries to identify wave trapping situations by engaging and properly combining two well established phenomena: (i) the trapped modes induced by arrays of cylinders and (ii) the pumping trapped modes which are known to occur in moonpools. To this end, the fundamental hydrodynamic boundary value problem for arrays of bottomless cylinders was solved using standard domain decomposition. The method employed expansions of the solutions for the velocity potentials in polar harmonics combined with the eigen-function expansions technique. The solution sought for the velocity potentials is achieved using the "direct" method of approach which accordingly requires the employment of a sophisticated matrix manipulation process. The elaboration of the concerned concept was motivated by three basic tasks: (i) to identify whether arrays of truncated and bottomless cylinders indeed preserve the occurrence of Neumann, Dirichlet and near trapped modes, extensively investigated for bottom-seated cylinders; (ii) to examine whether the expected pumping modes in moonpools modify the characteristics of the hydrodynamic resonance regimes (trapped modes) in the open liquid space between the cylinders and vice versa and (iii) to explore the possibility to suggest relevant configurations as parts of integrated mechanisms for practical applications, focusing a fortiori to clusters of hydrodynamically interacting Oscillating Water Columns (OWCs). The method developed is generic and can be employed for arbitrary configurations of multi-body arrays accommodating bottomless cylinders with uneven geometrical characteristics. Trapped modes are identified numerically as peaks in loading and this fact has been explicitly demonstrated in rows of cylinders. Therefore, the numerical results shown and discussed in the present are based on a specific in-line array that has been investigated in the past for bottom-seated cylinders. The investigated subject, i.e. whether the combined wave trapping induced by the examined configuration could be conceived as an efficient water wave power extraction mechanism is approached and discussed through dedicated computations of the free-surface displacements in the moonpools. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.