The seawall is a classic structure for coastal protection. The ability to predict the wave loading and runup on the seawall plays a critical role in the design of the seawall, particularly in a high sea state and/or during a storm condition involving wave breaking and violent wave impact. This paper contributes to the numerical comparative study organized by the International Hydrodynamics Committee at the 32nd International Ocean and Polar Engineering Conference (ISOPE 2022), in which the wave load on a curved seawall with different scales was considered. The computational fluid dynamic software STAR-CCM+ was used to predict the wave elevations and wave-induced pressure on the seawall, as well as to quantify the turbulence effects through comparing the results from a laminar flow simulation and the corresponding large eddy simulation. It can be concluded that the results of the present study can reasonably capture the feature of the wave impact observed in the experimental data. More important, the results confirm that the turbulence effect is insignificant during the impact for both small-scale and full-scale modeling.
As a classic coastal protection infrastructure, the seawall has been widely used in practice. The most critical parameters to be considered in seawall design are the maximum wave loading and runup on the seawall. The former is linked with the structural safety of the seawall, and the latter contributes to the evaluation of the probability of overtopping and coastal flooding. Great effort has been devoted to the design and optimisation of the seawall geometry aiming to reduce the wave loads and runup. Typical approaches include the curved front (e.g., De Chowdhury et al., 2017) and vertical seawall with parapets installed on the top (e.g., Castellino et al., 2018; Dong et al., 2021). The latter has been proven to be an effective design to avoid overtopping through diverting the wave toward the seaward direction (Ravindar et al., 2019, 2021, 2022; Stagonas et al., 2020; Ravindar and Sriram, 2021). The recurved parapet (e.g., Ravindar et al., 2022) in particular has attracted interest because it has the benefit of reducing the wave loads.
