Investigation of the Safety of Seawalls against Scouring

Scouring phenomena is one of the most important issues in Coastal Engineering. Constructing of protective structures such as seawalls on shoreline can cause scouring and estimation of scouring depth in front of such structures is one of the important problems in design of their foundation. In this paper, based on experimental data, the beach level changes and potential of scouring at different locations in front of the constructed seawalls and in case of natural coast without protective structures are estimated and compared which can be useful in coastal engineering studies and design and management of coastal defense projects. The results predicted by the model are compared with the experimental data indicating the good accuracy of the proposed model.The results obtained from the present work clearly indicate that, the construction of seawalls at the shoreline results in a reduction of the associated seaward sediment transport and bed profile evolution but increases the local scouring depth which may cause damage to such structures. Incorporating the nonlinear effect of wave and wave current interaction into the proposed model has resulted in an improvement in prediction of sediment transport, bed level changes and scouring depth in front of seawalls. This, in turn, results in a more effective design of seawalls to increase their safety against scouring

کلیدواژه ها:

scouring depth ، seawall ، sediment transport ، undertow ، wave-current interaction