Hydraulic Response of Rubble Mound Breakwaters

Abstract

An introduction to the principles and fundamentals of designing rubble mound breakwaters, led to the definition of two important white spots in designing rubble mound breakwaters. These were selected for further investigations in the present thesis. 1. Design of berm breakwaters: A generally lack of data and design formulae was identifed, but especially wave overtopping was detected as an enourmous white spot. 2. Overtopping scale effects: The motivation for the CLASH project was an expected scale effect on overtopping of rubble mound structures, leading to unsafe results obtained in a physical model. In the CLASH project comparisons of prototype and model results were performed, which confirmed the expected scale effect as more overtopping was measured in prototype. However, many possible model effects were identified, and it could not be ruled out that the differences observed were due to model effects only. Therefore, one of the main conclusions of the CLASH project was that large tests were needed, in order to obtain reliable recommendations on overtopping scale effects. These have been performed in the present project.