Effects of nonlinearities on the gap resonances between two free-heaving barges

The hydrodynamic characteristics of the gap resonances between two identical side-by-side barges are investigated in a constrained interpolation profile method-based numerical wave tank. Each barge can heave freely under the excitation of the incident waves. This paper mainly concentrates on the influences of the nonlinearities during the gap resonances on their hydrodynamic performance, via the parameter study of the incident-wave height. Numerical results demonstrated that the nonlinear gap resonances' magnitudes may reach close to or exceed that of the linear gap resonance and naturally contain strong nonlinearities when considering the heave responses of the side-by-side barges. Meanwhile, the effects of the heave responses on the key hydrodynamic parameters cannot be ignored as well. Therefore, the wave run-ups of the barges are of significant importance for the investigation. On the one hand, the wave run-ups directly reflect the coupling effects between the gap resonances and the twin barges' heave responses. On the other hand, the nonlinearities of the wave run-ups perform stronger than the wave elevation at the gap. Moreover, the linear wave run-ups are proposed via the linear formulas to qualitatively and quantitively investigate the effects of the nonlinearities on the inner process of the wave run-ups by comparison. Based on the harmonic analysis, the features of the distributions of the first four order harmonics of the wave elevation at the gap, the wave run-ups, and the wave loads are illustrated.