Nonlinear and Stochastic Dynamics of Compliant Offshore Structures (Solid Mechanics and Its Applications (98))

The purpose of this monograph is to show how a compliant offshore structure in an ocean environment can be modeled in two and three di­ mensions. The monograph is divided into five parts. Chapter 1 provides the engineering motivation for this work, that is, offshore structures. These are very complex structures used for a variety of applications. It is possible to use beam models to initially study their dynamics. Chapter 2 is a review of variational methods, and thus includes the topics: princi­ ple of virtual work, D'Alembert's principle, Lagrange's equation, Hamil­ ton's principle, and the extended Hamilton's principle. These methods are used to derive the equations of motion throughout this monograph. Chapter 3 is a review of existing transverse beam models. They are the Euler-Bernoulli, Rayleigh, shear and Timoshenko models. The equa­ tions of motion are derived and solved analytically using the extended Hamilton's principle, as outlined in Chapter 2. For engineering purposes, the natural frequencies of the beam models are presented graphically as functions of normalized wave number and geometrical and physical pa­ rameters. Beam models are useful as representations of complex struc­ tures. In Chapter 4, a fluid force that is representative of those that act on offshore structures is formulated. The environmental load due to ocean current and random waves is obtained using Morison's equa­ tion. The random waves are formulated using the Pierson-Moskowitz spectrum with the Airy linear wave theory.

This book contains substantially extended and revised versions of the best papers from the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2010), held in Funchal, Madeira, Portugal, June 8-12, 2010.

Two invited papers are presented together with 39 contributions, which were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 full papers presented at the conference (out of 448 submissions). They reflect state-of-the-art research work that is often driven by real-world applications, thus successfully relating the academic with the industrial community. The topics covered are: databases and information systems integration, artificial intelligence and decision support systems, information systems analysis and specification, software agents and internet computing, and human-computer interaction.