THREE-DIMENSIONAL HYDRAULIC MODELS
Clients: Various Members of the Petroleum Industry, City of Long Beach, County of Orange
Coastal Frontiers personnel have conducted large-scale, three-dimensional physical model studies to investigate wave propagation, armor stability, sediment transport, and the effects of coastal structures. Specific items of interest included refraction-diffraction effects, variations in wave characteristics around coastal structures, and sediment transport in the nearshore zone.
A representative example is a moveable bed model used to predict the effectiveness of beach nourishment coupled with a perched-beach at a Southern California location. Salient findings included an acceleration of alongshore currents in the nearshore region accompanied by scour adjacent to the submerged rock structures used to create the perched beach. The modeling effort, which was undertaken at the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory, is summarized below.
Wave Properties
Irregular and monochromatic wave generation
Variable wave direction
Parameters Investigated
Wave refraction and diffraction
Sediment transport and beach change
Nearshore profile evolution
Wave attenuation over submerged structures
Seabed scour adjacent to structures