An overtopping formula for shallow water vertical seawalls by SWASH

Abstract

There is now wide evidence that phase-resolving numerical models can capture the general physics of the overtopping process even under complex hydrodynamics. Based on this outcome, an extensive parametric study has been carried out with the model SWASH, to develop a design formula that uniformly predicts the overtopping rate at vertical seawalls for both breaking and non-breaking wave conditions. The use of the numerical model has allowed to vary the experimental conditions smoothly, avoiding the typical limitation of laboratory experiments. Furthermore, particular tests have been performed to assess whether, and up to which extent, the mean overtopping discharge is affected by the low frequency components of the incident wave spectrum.The formula relates the overtopping rate to a new water level statistic, which represents the average of the highest one-fourth wave displacements at the toe of the wall; it has initially been derived for planar beaches and then extended to the case of slope varying foreshores. A comparison with an array of 200 laboratory experiments confirms that the new parametrization can reduce the scatter of data compared to the EurOtop equation.