Stability of rubble mound breakwaters against solitary waves

Abstract

No formulas currently exist to design armour units against tsunami attack. To develop such formulae, laboratory experiments were carried out to clarify the failure mechanism of these types of structures. Also, the behavior of armour units against real cases of tsunami attack during the 2011 Tohoku tsunami were evaluated. Both the results of the laboratory experiments and the breakwaters studied in the field where then analyzed in terms of well established formulas such as that of Van der Meer or Hudson. The design of structures that only fail partially during a given tsunami event ("resilient" or "tenacious" structures) should be prioritized in future counter-measures, and in order to make it possible to construct such structures a modification of the Hudson formula for their design is proposed.