In the present chapter, the first of two chapters dealing with surface-piercing bodies, we impose an essential restriction that no bounded part of the free surface is separated from infinity. For the three-dimentional problem, this means that the free surface is a connected two-dimensional region (possibly multiply connected). In two dimensions, the assumption requires that there is only one surface-piercing body. However, a finite number of totally submerged bodies might be present in both cases. Supplementing this general restriction by one condition of technical nature or another, a method was developed (essentially by John) for proving the uniqueness theorem for various geometries and all values of ν > 0 (see Section 3.2). Provided the uniqueness is established, the machinery of integral equations developed in Section 3.1 leads to the unique solvability of the water-wave problem. Without the assumption about uniqueness, the integral equations method possibly does not guaranee the solvability for a certain sequence of values tending to infinity. Moreover, application of integral equations is rather tricky for semisubmerged bodies even when the uniqueness holds because of so-called irregular frequencies, which are also investigated in Section 3.1.

Integral Equations for Surface-Piercing Bodies

The essential point in application of the integral equation techniques to the case of a surface-piercing body is that the wetted boundary S is not a closed surface (contour) in three (two) dimensions, and it is bounded by a curve (a finite set of points) along the body's intersection with the free surface.