Numerical Test on the Impacts of Submerged Breakwaters for Different Design Parameters

With the improvement of the living standards, the recreational use of the beach is gradually valued in China. There was a need of the development of artificial beach to meet the need of increased recreational use of the beach. Submerged breakwaters (SBW) is a widely used coastal protection measure, especially for the beach for tourist and water sports, which is constructed to reduce the wave condition to a required level to protect the beach from erosion and also to increase the recreational value of the beach. Understanding the impacts of the SBW on the transformation of the waves and the circulation induced by wave setup behind the SBW is important both for the proper design of the SBW for the protection of beach from erosion and also for water safety for the people enjoying water sports at artificial beach. There are so many design parameters including the dimensions of the SBW and wave conditions that impact the performance of the SBW. During carrying out a beach restoration project in China, it was recognized that there is a strong demand for the efficient method that the engineers can use in designing the SBW to predict the response of the SBW for different design parameters considering the detailed wave-structure interaction. An intensive numerical experiment had been carried out using wave resolving model for the evaluation of the impacts of the SBW on the wave transformation behind the SBW and also to develop an efficient tool to predict the wave tramsmission coefficients for various SBW design parameters. The development of such tool using intensive numerical experiment is discussed in this paper.