To validate the incident wave loading feature, several beams of increasing diameter are subjected to the same incident wave load, athwartships. From Hicks we have expressions describing the actual load on the beam in terms of the cross-sectional area of the beam and the response as a function of the beam's structural mass and the entrained fluid mass. Therefore, the acceleration of a rigid mass is

where In these expressions, P is the incident fluid pressure, is the fluid mass density, is the fluid speed of sound, C and are area coefficients for the cross-section, is the (equivalent) circular radius of the cross-section, and m is the mass of the beam structure. For a beam with a circular cross-section .

The loading of immersed beams in Abaqus is achieved using incident wave loading. In this test an unconnected array of eight beam elements is subjected to a plane wave incident at 90° from the plane of the array. The amplitude of the wave is linearly increasing, providing a uniform pressure gradient. The beams have identical structural properties, but their wetted cross-sections vary from 0.3 m to 35.0 m. Consequently, the loads generated on the elements due to the incident wave will vary, and the responses will vary due to the different entrained fluid masses. Both Abaqus/Standard and Abaqus/Explicit are tested.