Variation Characteristics of Wave Field around Three-Dimensional Low-Crested Structure

Abstract

In recent years, countries like Europe and Japan have been involved in many researches on the LowCrested Structure (LCS) which is the method to protect beach erosion and it is regarded as an alternative to the submerged breakwaters, and compiled its results and released the design manual. In the past, studies on LCS have focused on two-dimensional wave transmission and calculating required weight of armor units, and these were mainly examined and discussed based on experiments. In this study, three-dimensional numerical analysis is performed on permeable LCS. The open-source CFD code olaFlow based on the Navier-Stokes momentum equations is applied to the numerical analysis, which is a strongly nonlinear analysis method that enables breaking and turbulence analysis. As a result, the distribution characteristics of the LCS such as water level, water flow, and turbulent kinetic energy were examined and discussed, then they were carefully compared and examined in the case of submerged breakwaters. The study results indicate that there is a difference between the flow patterns of longshore current near the shoreline, the spatial distribution of longshore and on-offshore directions of mean turbulent kinetic energy in case of submerged breakwaters and LCS. It is predicted that the difference in these results leads to the difference in sand movement.