You would distribute the weight over all the elements, right?
And you would distribute the buoyancy over all the wetted nodes?
And you would model the buoyancy as, what? A nonlinear spring at each wetted node, grounded at the global zero waterplane?
Speaking of which, do you intend to model wave action, i.e. with a nonplanar wetted boundary?
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I claim zero expertise in this field, or any other. I'm hoping that you'll refrain from insulting me long enough that the people who actually know this stuff will start to contribute and turn it into a discussion that's useful to you, and perhaps to someone else. When that happens, that's why these forums don't suck.
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I'm reminded of a dynamics problem from ~1972. My friends were modeling a helicopter (for a simulator), and the first landing gear bounce on landing took it up to 1600 feet. They had to decrease the time interval for that computation in order to make it bounded. Sort of a sampling problem, really, not the equilibrium problem you seem to be worried about. The whole simulator ran on a computer that would have made a Timex Sinclair (which appeared much later) look like a supercomputer. They may or may not have upgraded the computers, but the simulators are still in service.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA