An unified design method of maritime works against waves

Abstract

The increase of the maritime traffic has always gone in parallel with the growth of the international economy, entailing an increase of the ship dimensions and the demand of harbor zones. This implies the design of breakwater in deeper areas and with severer climate conditions. Maritime structures and particularly breakwaters must be designed to satisfy the project requirement and to control wind-wave action (ROM 1.0, 2009). Depending on their typology, breakwaters reflect, dissipate, transmit, and radiate incident wave energy. Thus, the superposition of incident waves and of those generated and transformed by the presence of breakwaters constitutes the set of oscillation patterns that affects the hydraulic performance of the structure (Losada et al., 1997). This evidently signifies that an understanding of the different processes involved in random wave interaction with structures is the basis for the development of reliable engineering design procedures. Three type of breakwater are usually considered in the breakwater design: mound, vertical or composite breakwaters. In the present state of art, there are different formulations to verify the design of a breakwater for the failure modes that can affect the parts and elements of the breakwater in its useful life. These equations are independents for each typology and each failure mode, even in the case of these are produced by the same agent. Therefore, the comparison between alternatives of different breakwater types for the same wave conditions and project requirements are very difficult and unclear. Moreover, there is no a methodology that allows the verification of other different typologies from the three traditional ones and, what is more, for a given breakwater typology, that allows the simultaneous verification of the failure modes produced by the same agent, in this case the wind waves. For several years the Environmental Fluid Dynamics Group (GDFA) of the University of Granada is working to quantify the behaviour of various breakwater typologies design as geometrical evolutions of the three traditional ones, and in particular, in the incident wave energy partition. Continuing this line of work, the aim of this Thesis is to deepen the knowledge of the hydraulic performance results of the wind wave-breakwater interaction and to develop a tool for the unified breakwater design. For this purposed the study will be based on the wave energy transformation by the presence of the structure.