Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering. Elsevier
Abstract
In this paper we couple collocated Boundary Element Methods (BEM) with unstructured analysis suitable
T-spline surfaces for solving a linear Boundary Integral Equation (BIE) arising in the
context of a ship-hydrodynamic problem, namely the so-called Neumann-Kelvin problem, following
the formulation by Brard (1972) [1] and Baar & Price (1988) [2]. The local-refinement capabilities
of the adopted T-spline bases, which are used for representing both the geometry of the hull and
approximating the solution of the associated BIE, in accordance with the Isogeometric concept
proposed by Hughes et al. (2005) [3], lead to a solver that achieves the same error level for many
fewer degrees of freedom as compared with the corresponding NURBS-based Isogeometric-BEM
solver recently developed in Belibassakis et al. (2013) [4]. In this connection, this paper makes a
step towards integrating modern CAD representations for ship-hulls with hydrodynamic solvers of
improved accuracy and efficiency, which is a prerequisite for building efficient ship-hull optimizers
