Novel Assessment Tools for Wave Dampening by Marine and Coastal Vegetation

作为海岸保护的一种自然形式，海岸植被在创造栖息地、碳汇和抑制海浪方面发挥着重要作用。该项目旨在通过使用新的模拟方法来提高对植被对波浪的抑制和对边界层的相关变化的理解。使用传统的计算流体力学和几何解析方法，在相同的模拟框架中解析许多相对较小的细节，如100-1000个植物茎，作为跨计算领域的几个波长，仍然对计算要求太高。ALFEA是一种基于传动线理论和有限元结构求解器的最新开发工具，不仅在解决大量固定杆件的影响方面显示出希望，而且还提供了在流体载荷下研究植物刚性和变形的影响的机会。该项目将首先通过对静态和柔性杆件进行验证研究来评估ALFEA在此类模拟中的准确性和适用性。

Coastal vegetation plays an important role in creating habitats, as a carbon sink and by dampening the waves as a natural form of coastal protection. This project aims to improve the understanding of wave dampening and related changes to boundary layers by vegetation through the use of novel simulation methods. Resolving many relatively small details like 100-1000s of plant stems in the same simulation framework as several wavelengths across the computational domain is still too computationally demanding using conventional computational fluid dynamics to geometry-resolving methods. ALFEA, a recently created tool based on Actuator Line Theory coupled with a Finite Element Structural Solver, shows promise in not only resolving the effect of large numbers of fixed stems, but also offers opportunities to investigate the effect of plant rigidity and deformation under fluid loading.This project will firstly assess the accuracy and suitability of ALFEA for such simulations by performing validation studies against published data for static and flexible stems.