Experimental evidence of critical phenomena in structure-water impact

The design of modem high-speed vessels makes clear that extreme care must be devoted to fluid-structure interaction problems. It is a matter of fact that dangerous impact phenomena occur in fast marine vehicles, leading to severe pressure load conditions of the hull structure. In this paper a new theoretical and experimental approach to the water impact problem is proposed. The basic idea relies on the water shock spectral response able to predict the occurrence of critical impact phenomena in terms of the characteristic parameters as the impact velocity, the body impacting mass and the natural frequencies of the structure.