Research and Development of New Breakwater Design Methods and Tools

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With the anticipated climate-related changes to coastal environments and increasing population densities along the worlds' shorelines, the design of coastal protection structures has never been more important. Breakwaters, typically constructed as rubble mounds of rock or concrete units, often serve as the first and last line of defense against shoreline erosion and storm-induced flooding. Although breakwaters are critical to protecting our shorelines, the forces exerted on them are not well understood. Consequently, the force balance approach used to design virtually all other civil engineering structures is not applied in current design methods for breakwaters. Instead, they are largely designed in the same manner as they were 50 years ago, through the application of limited data sets derived from laboratory tests and qualitative lessons learned from past breakwater failures. The proposed research project will attempt to address this acute need for new and reliable design tools in an academic-industry collaborative project between the University of Ottawa and Baird W.F. & Associates. The first stage of the project will consist of an extensive experimental program performed at the National Research Council of Canada to investigate the flow through breakwater armour layers and the hydrodynamic forces exerted on individual armour units. The results will be used to develop new mathematical relationships describing the hydraulic stability of armour layers, and to further investigate the validity of a newly proposed numerical model for simulating wave-armour layer interactions. Physical-based processes governing armour layer stability, uncovered during the experimental program, will be incorporated into the numerical model to improve the physics on which it is based. The new design formulae and cutting-edge numerical model will be used by Baird W.F. & Associates to gain a competitive edge on the international stage for the reliability-based design of coastal protection structures. With hundreds (potentially thousands) of kilometers of coastal protection structures in Canada and abroad likely requiring upgrades over the next 50 years, opportunities to exploit these new design methods will continue to emerge at an increasing rate.