An explicit formulation for the evolution of nonlinear surface waves interacting with a submerged body

An explicit formulation to study nonlinear waves interacting with a submerged body in an ideal fluid of infinite depth is presented. The formulation allows one to decompose the nonlinear wave–body interaction problem into body and free‐surface problems. After the decomposition, the body problem satisfies a modified body boundary condition in an unbounded fluid domain, while the free‐surface problem satisfies modified nonlinear free‐surface boundary conditions. It is then shown that the nonlinear free‐surface problem can be further reduced to a closed system of two nonlinear evolution equations expanded in infinite series for the free‐surface elevation and the velocity potential at the free surface. For numerical experiments, the body problem is solved using a distribution of singularities along the body surface and the system of evolution equations, truncated at third order in wave steepness, is then solved using a pseudo‐spectral method based on the fast Fourier transform. A circular cylinder translating steadily near the free surface is considered and it is found that our numerical solutions show excellent agreement with the fully nonlinear solution using a boundary integral method. We further validate our solutions for a submerged circular cylinder oscillating vertically or fixed under incoming nonlinear waves with other analytical and numerical results. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.