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Under the assumptions of classical linearised water-wave theory, the time-harmonic two-dimensional motion of a rigid body floating in the surface of a fluid may be characterised by various coefficients which express components of the hydrodynamic forces acting on that body. For a single body in isolation, these are relatively simple to calculate. For bodies placed next to a vertical wall, the corresponding calculations are often much more complicated. In this paper the well-known wide-spacing approximation is used to develop approximations to the hydrodynamic coefficients for a body having a vertical plane of symmetry, but otherwise of arbitrary cross-section, next to a wall solely in terms of the results for an isolated body. Exact results are compared with the wide-spacing approximations for semi-immersed circular cylinders and cylinders of rectangular cross-section. They show that the approximation works remarkably well over all frequency ranges and even when the cylinders are very close to the wall.

The subject of this paper, the scattering of flexural waves by constrained elastic plates floating on water is relatively new and not an area that Professor Newman has worked in, as far as the authors are aware. However, in two respects there are connections to his own work. The first is the reference to his work with H. Maniar on the exciting forces on the elements of a long line of fixed vertical bottom-mounted cylinders in waves. In their paper (J Fluid Mech 339 (1997) 309–329) they pointed out the remarkable connection between the large forces on cylinders near the centre of the array at frequencies close to certain trapped-mode frequencies, which had been discovered earlier, and showed that there was another type of previously unknown trapped mode, which gave rise to large forces. In Sect. 6 of this paper the ideas described by Maniar and Newman are returned to and it is shown how the phenomenon of large forces is related to trapped, or standing Rayleigh–Bloch waves, in the present context of elastic waves. But there is a more general way in which the paper relates to Professor Newman and that is in the flavour and style of the mathematics that are employed. Thus extensive use has been made of classical mathematical methods including integral-transform techniques, complex-function theory and the use of special functions in a manner which reflects that used by Professor Newman in many of his important papers on ship hydrodynamics and related fields.

The problem of an infinite periodic array of identical floating elastic plates subject to forcing from plane incident waves is considered. This study is motivated by the problem of trying to model wave propagation in the marginal ice zone, a region of ocean consisting of an arbitrary packing of floating ice sheets. It is shown that the problem considered can be formulated exactly in terms of the solution to an integral equation in a manner similar to that used for the problem of wave scattering by a single elastic floating plate, the key difference here being the use of a modified periodic Green function. The convergence of this Green function in its original form is poor, but can be accelerated by a transformation. It is shown that the results from the method satisfy energy conservation and that in the particular case of a fixed rigid rectangular plate which spans the periodicity uniformly the solution reduces to that for a two-dimensional rigid dock. Solutions for a range of elastic-plate geometries are also presented.

In this paper, some recent developments and new results concerning the trapping of waves by arrays of vertical circular cylinders is presented. In particular, the cases are examined when there is a circular arrangement of cylinders and both finite and infinite periodic linear arrays of identical cylinders. Only for the infinite array is there pure trapping of waves – known as Rayleigh–Bloch or edge waves – which, for particular dominant wavenumbers, reduce to the well-known trapped-mode solutions for a cylinder between two parallel walls having either Neumann or Dirichlet conditions upon them. This latter case is considered separately and some new results are presented. In the circular array and finite linear array the concept of near-trapping is introduced where large resonant motions are found to occur at certain frequencies of the incident wave field. In the case of the finite linear array, these near-trapping frequencies are related to the Rayleigh–Bloch trapped-wave frequencies for the infinite array. Finally, the case when there are two or more lines of cylinders in the linear array is examined.

The existence of edge waves, or trapped modes, travelling above a single long horizontal submerged cylinder is well established in the linearised theory of water waves. In the present paper, the possibility of wave-trapping by multiple submerged horizontal circular cylinders is considered. The trapped mode solutions are constructed by means of a multipole approach combined with an addition formula for Bessel functions and requires finding the non-trivial solutions of a real infinite system of algebraic equations. The case of a single submerged cylinder is returned to briefly, where results for symmetric trapped modes are reproduced and new numerical results for antisymmetric modes are presented. A large range of results are also presented for multiple cylinders.