Solitary wave interaction with porous breakwaters

This paper presents a numerical model for long-wave interaction with vertic ally walled porous structures. Based on depth-integrated equations of motio n,the model is suitable for weakly nonlinear, weakly dispersive transient w aves propagating in both variable-depth open water and porous regions. Comp arisons with experimental data for problems with one horizontal dimension s how that a single choice of empirical parameters for hydraulic conductivity gives accurate numerical predictions for various sizes of rocks used in th e construction of porous breakwaters. A rigorous experimental comparison of a porous breakwater gap shows that the numerical model is excellent in pre dicting the waveform and phase of the transformed wave. In this paper atten tion is focused on the reflection, transmission, and diffraction of solitar y waves by a porous breakwater.