Probabilistic design of breakwaters in shallow hurricane-prone areas

One of the failure mechanisms of a rubble mound breakwater is the failure of its armour layer. In order to determine the stability of an armour layer, the design load has to be defined, which is in fact the wave that attacks the structure. Being a highly stochastic phenomenon, the wave action is not easily defined, while there is always some...

Rationalization of safety factors for breakwater design in hurricane-prone areas

This paper presents the development of a semi-probabilistic method for armour layer design of rubble mound breakwaters, which is based on the use of safety factors. The objective is to introduce an approach that is both attractive to designers and sufficiently reliable when a high degree of uncertainty is involved in the design process. The main...