Fine sediment accumulation in a harbor protected by a breakwater of surface-piercing type

Abstract

A surface-piercing barrier model is presented for understanding morphological development in the sheltered region and investigating the main factors causing the severe accumulation. Surface-piercing structures like vertical barriers, surface docks and floating breakwaters are recently favored from the point of view of a marine scenario since they do not in general partition the natural sea. The numerical solutions are compared with experimental data on wave profiles and morphological change rates within a rectangular harbor of a constant depth protected by surface-piercing thin breakwaters as a simplified problem. Our numerical study involves several modules: 1) wave dynamics analyzed by a plane-wave approximation, 2) suspended sediment transport combined with sediment erosion-deposition model, and 3) concurrent morphological changes. Scattering waves are solved by using a plane wave method without inclusion of evanescent modes. Evanescent modes are only considered in predicting the reflection ratio against the vertical barrier and energy losses due to vortex shedding from the lower edge of plate are taken into account. A new relationship to relate the near-bed concentration to the depth-mean concentration is presented by analyzing the vertical structure of concentration. The numerical solutions were also compared with experimental data on morphological changes within a rectangular harbor of constant water depth, Through the numerical experiments, the vortex-induced flow appears to be not ignorable in predicting the morphological changes although the immersion depth of a plate is not deep.