Research and Development of New Breakwater Design Methods and Tools

随着预期的与气候有关的沿海环境变化和世界海岸线人口密度的增加，海岸保护结构的设计从未像现在这样重要。防波堤通常被建造成碎石堆或混凝土单元，通常是抵御海岸线侵蚀和风暴引发的洪水的第一道也是最后一道防线。尽管防波堤对保护我们的海岸线至关重要，但施加在防波堤上的力量还没有得到很好的了解。因此，用于设计几乎所有其他土木工程结构的力平衡方法在目前的防波堤设计方法中并不适用。相反，它们的设计在很大程度上与50年前相同，通过应用从实验室测试中获得的有限数据集和从过去防波堤故障中吸取的定性教训。拟议的研究项目将试图解决渥太华大学和Baird W.F.&Associates之间的学术-行业合作项目中对新的可靠设计工具的迫切需求。该项目的第一阶段将包括在加拿大国家研究委员会执行的一项广泛的实验计划，以调查防波堤装甲层的流动和施加在单个装甲单位上的水动力。这些结果将被用来建立描述装甲层水力稳定性的新的数学关系式，并进一步研究新提出的模拟波-装甲层相互作用的数值模型的有效性。在实验计划中发现的控制装甲层稳定性的基于物理的过程将被纳入到数值模型中，以改进它所基于的物理。Baird W.F.&Associates将使用新的设计公式和尖端数值模型，以便在基于可靠性的海岸防护结构设计方面在国际舞台上获得竞争优势。由于加拿大和国外数百公里(可能数千公里)的海岸保护结构可能需要在未来50年内进行升级，利用这些新设计方法的机会将继续以越来越快的速度出现。

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.