9714311 Webster The objective of the research is to develop theoretical tools for the feasibility study and the design of a floating runway for commercial air traffic in protected waters. There are three technical issues which govern the feasibility of a floating runway: structure, dynamic response and mooring. Since the light structures of shallow depth like floating runway are typically very flexible, the dynamic response of these runways to a variety of loads including waves, earthquakes, and the landing and taking off of aircraft needs to be small enough to avoid the structural failure and not to affect the airplane operations. Finally, mooring system must resist loads resulting from the action of wind, waves, currents and tides without failing. In the proposed research the runway will be modeled as orthotropic plate which we can use to analyze and optimize the horizontal distribution of the stiffness. The motion of the plate will be dynamically coupled with hydrodynamic loading from the free-surface motion of the surrounding fluid and with the mooring system. For determination of the hydrodynamic loads, the fluid region under the runway and outside the runway will be modeled by Green-Naghdi theory. The research will provide designers of these new platforms the tools necessary to analyze critical problems associated with these new platforms: motions and structural optimization, effects of earthquakes and tsunamis, mooring loads and localized slamming loads. All of these problems must be addressed before a design can be considered feasible and at the present time are no comprehensive tools available to perform this analysis. ***
