Benefits of vegetation for mitigating wave impacts on vertical seawalls

Daniel Rosenberger, Reza Marsooli

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

This study quantifies the benefits of vegetation for reducing wave loads on seawalls and the probability of failure due to sliding and overturning. A computational fluid dynamic model is used to quantify wave forces and moments on a laboratory-scale vertical seawall in the presence and absence of vegetation. The model is first calibrated using existing laboratory measurements and then implemented to simulate wave impacts under 200 various wave scenarios. The simulated forces are analyzed to calculate the sliding force and overturning moment and quantify the benefit of vegetation for reducing the seawall failure incidents and increasing the factor of safety. Under the laboratory-scale conditions considered in this study, vegetation causes a reduction of up to 89 percent in the wave force, leading to a substantial decrease in sliding and overturning failure scenarios and increase in the scenarios with acceptable factors of safety. It is found that a smaller seawall combined with vegetation results in an overturning and sliding performance, in terms of failure and factor of safety, similar to the performance of a larger seawall without vegetation. The results suggest that vegetation has a potential to protect coastal structures and allow engineers to design efficient hybrid nature-based and engineering defenses.

Original languageEnglish
Article number110974
JournalOcean Engineering
Volume250
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 Apr 2022

Keywords

  • Hybrid flood mitigation
  • REEF3D
  • Reliability analysis
  • Seawall
  • Vegetation
  • Wave load

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