The paper presents a monolithic finite element model for the hydro-visco-elastic analysis of floating membranes interacting with ocean waves. The formulation couples linearised potential flow and viscoelastic membrane equations, offering a versatile tool for modelling arbitrarily shaped floating membranes in varying sea-bed topography. The paper also presents a wet modal analysis for the coupled problem, accounting for the added mass and stiffness of the surrounding fluid. This model is used to study the dependence of the wet natural frequencies of floating membranes on the material properties. It is also used to analyse the reflection, transmission, scattering and absorption of ocean wave energy by 1D and 2D floating membranes. Notably, the paper underscores the impact of proportional material damping on these observed phenomena. The results highlight local peaks in the viscoelastic behaviour at the calculated wet natural frequencies, and demonstrate the outward dispersion of incoming wave around finite 2D membranes. Furthermore, the model is employed to examine the interaction of viscoelastic membranes with other structures, such as a monopile, under the influence of ocean waves. This comprehensive investigation contributes to a deeper understanding of the fluid–structure interaction inherent to certain floating solar, wave-energy converter and floating breakwater technologies.

In this paper, the comparative study carried out for focused wave interaction with a moving cylinder in ISOPE-2020 is reported. The fixed cylinder cases are reported in the companion paper as Part A (Sriram, Agarwal, Yan et al., 2021). The paper discusses qualitative and quantitative comparison between four different numerical solvers that participated in this comparative study. This is a challenging problem, as the cylinder moves over 40 m and interacts with the focusing waves. The performance of various solvers is compared for two different moving cylinder speeds. Both weakly coupled models and full Navier–Stokes (NS) solvers with different strategies for modeling the cylinder motion were adopted by the participants. In particular, different methods available for numerically simulating the forward speed problem emerge from this paper. The qualitative comparison based on the wave probe and pressure probe time histories between laminar and turbulent solvers is presented. Furthermore, the quantitative error analysis for individual solvers shows deviations up to 30% for moving wave probes and 50% for pressure time history. The reliability of each method is discussed based on all the wave probe and pressure probe discrepancies against experiments. The deviations for higher speed shown by all solvers indicate that further improvements in the modeling capabilities are required.