Hydrodynamic Interactions between a Solitary Wave and a Partially Submerged Structure of Either a Thin Porous Wall or a 2-D Finite-Length Body with Attached Dual Porous Walls

This dissertation presents the development of analytical models for the investigation of the hydrodynamic interactions between a solitary wave and either a partially submerged porous wall or a 2-D finite-length body with attached dual porous walls. Analytical solutions to describe the propagation of an incident wave and the associated reflected and transmitted waves after the interaction are derived by solving the governing equations. The solutions of reflection and transmission related unknown coefficients, as functions of wave number components and other physical parameters, are formulated by applying the matching conditions of the continuous velocities and velocity potentials at the interfaces of the fluid domains to evaluate the reflection and transmission of a solitary wave. The pressures according to the Bernoulli equation are calculated and the hydrodynamic forces are computed by integrating the pressure distributions on the structural surfaces. A series of laboratory experiments were carried out to collect the free-surface elevations for the verification of the derived analytical solutions under various cases of interest. The comparisons of the incident, reflected and transmitted wave profiles predicted by the present analytical solutions with the experimental data and other published results are presented and discussed. It is demonstrated through result comparisons that the present analytical solutions for a given incident solitary wave can provide reliable predications on the time varying transmitted waves including wave peak and slightly overestimate the reflected wave height. For the topic of a partially submerged porous wall, the horizontal hydrodynamic forces from the present analytical solutions are found to agree reasonably well with other published experimental data when a special case of non-porous wall is considered. The physical parameters that affect the hydrodynamic forces on structures are investigated. More importantly, for the evaluation of the performance of the proposed partially submerged body systems, the parametric studies with results showing the effects of the incident wave height, submerged depth of porous structures, draft of 2-D partially submerged body, porous-effect parameter, and structural length on wave run-up, time variations of the free-surface elevations, and the overall reflection and transmission coefficients are presented and discussed.