EXPERIMENTS ON DESIGN WAVE HEIGHT IN SHALLOW WATER

Abstract

Traditional depth-limited criteria for design of structures in shallow water were found not to be valid in hydraulic model tests with irregular waves. An extensive series of experiments showed that in addition to the height of the short period waves and the depth at the structure, the design wave height is a function of long wave action and wave setup at the structure. The additional effects are related to incident wave height and they result in an increase in depth at the structure. Thus, a simple design expression was developed by introducing a depth modification into a standard depth-limited design equation.