PHYSICAL EXPERIMENTS ON OVERHANGING PARAPETS UNDER NON-BREAKING WAVE CONDITIONS

Abstract

The use of sea-wall and storm-wall structures within valuable landscape or urban areas often imposes rather restrictive limits in terms of structures height. A viable solution to address the safety against overtopping and the architectonical requirements is the use of recurved parapets. However, this type of structure is exposed to large impulsive loads that have been recently described and named as confined-crest impact, (C-CI), (Castellino et al., 2018) and caused several failures such as those in Strand (South Africa), Pico Island (Portugal) and Civitavecchia (Italy), (Castellino et al., 2021; Dermentzoglou et al., 2020; Martinelli et al., 2018). Accordingly, tools to properly design these curvilinear structures and to carry out comparative assessments between the induced advantage in terms of overtopping and increased structural complexity due to its shape and the C-CI are required. This work aims to identify practical design tools and provide benchmark data for the validation of the CFD model presented in the abstract n. 1643: “Castellino et al., Numerical experiments on overhanging parapets under non-breaking wave conditions”. A series of non-breaking regular and irregular waves experiments have been performed at the TU Delft Hydraulic Engineering Laboratory to investigate the contrasting behaviour of the overtopping phenomena and the exerted impulsive wave load on recurved parapets.