The free-surface Green function method is widely used in solving the radiation or diffraction problems caused by a ship or ocean structure oscillating on the waves. In the context of inviscid potential flow, hydrodynamic problems such as multi-body interaction and tank side wall effect cannot be properly dealt with based on the traditional free-surface frequency domain Green function method, in which the water viscosity is omitted and the energy dissipation effect is absent. In this paper, an open-sea Green function with viscous dissipation was presented within the theory ofvisco-potential flow. Then the tank Green function with a partial reflection from the side walls in wave tanks was formulated as a formal sum of open-sea Green functions representing the infinite images between two parallel side walls of the source in the tank. The new far-field characteristics of the tank Green function is vitally important fur improving the validity of side-wall effects evaluation, which can be used in supervising the tank model tests.
