Dit boek is bedoeld als een eerste kennismaking met het vakgebied waterbouwkunde, zonder de pretentie volledig te zijn. Het is gemotiveerd vanuit de ervaring van de auteur dat het heerlijk is om in het vakgebied te grasduinen. Er is gegrasduind in enkele fundamentele aspecten van het vakgebied met verwijzingen naar de huidige praktijk en hier en daar de historie. De nadruk ligt op fysische processen en de mathematische beschrijving daarvan. Daarnaast is er aandacht voor het schetsmatig ontwerpen van enkele waterbouwkundige constructies.

Wave height attenuation in vegetation canopies is often all attributed to the drag force exerted by vegetation, whereas other potential dissipation process is often neglected. Previous studies without vegetation have found that opposing currents can induce wave breaking and greatly increase dissipation. It is not clear if similar process may also occur in vegetation canopies. We conducted systematic flume experiments to show that wave breaking in opposing currents can occur in vegetated flows, but only in submerged canopies with shear currents above vegetation top. Subsequently, we developed a new analytical model to understand and assess the contribution of both drag-induced dissipation in the lower vegetation layer and current-induced breaking in the upper free layer. A new generic drag coefficient relation was applied in the model to quantify drag-induced dissipation with various current-wave combinations. It shows that breaking induced by opposing currents constitutes an essential part (up to 87%) of the total dissipation, which leads to considerably higher dissipation than the cases with following currents. Breaking can occur with various submergence ratios and with small opposing currents in the submerged vegetation field. It indicates that similar breaking process is likely to occur in real vegetation fields. The present study reveals and quantifies the current-induced wave breaking process that has not been reported before, which can improve our understanding of vegetation wave dissipation capacity in field conditions.

Because wind is one of the main forcings in storm surge, we present an idealised process-based model to study the influence of topographic variations on the frequency response of large-scale coastal basins subject to time-periodic wind forcing. Coastal basins are represented by a semi-enclosed rectangular inner region forced by wind. It is connected to an outer region (represented as an infinitely long channel) without wind forcing, which allows waves to freely propagate outward. The model solves the three-dimensional linearised shallow water equations on the f plane, forced by a spatially uniform wind field that has an arbitrary angle with respect to the along-basin direction. Turbulence is represented using a spatially uniform vertical eddy viscosity, combined with a partial slip condition at the bed. The surface elevation amplitudes, and hence the vertical profiles of the velocity, are obtained using the finite element method (FEM), extended to account for the connection to the outer region. The results are then evaluated in terms of the elevation amplitude averaged over the basin’s landward end, as a function of the wind forcing frequency. In general, the results point out that adding topographic elements in the inner region (such as a topographic step, a linearly sloping bed or a parabolic cross-basin profile), causes the resonance peaks to shift in the frequency domain, through their effect on local wave speed. The Coriolis effect causes the resonance peaks associated with cross-basin modes (which without rotation only appear in the response to cross-basin wind) to emerge also in the response to along-basin wind and vice versa.