Spline shell element and plane-wave approximation for dynamic response of submerged structures

This paper presents a performance study on the plane-wave approximation for dynamic responses of shell structures using spline finite elements, in particular, the interaction between submerged shell structures and the surrounding infinite fluid. The shell structures are discretized by using quadrilateral spline shell elements. The element is doubly curved. Each element consists of nine primary nodes and eight auxiliary nodes, and has a total of 63 degrees of freedom. The inter-element is C1 continuous. A non-reflecting boundary based on acoustic approximations is used to model the infinite fluid medium. Two examples are presented. Results demonstrated good performance.