Coastal bridge damage has become a severe issue of concern in the recent past with the destruction of a considerable number of bridges under the impact of waves during tsunami and storm surges. These events have become more frequent, with waves reaching the bridge deck and causing upliftment and destruction. Past studies have demonstrated the establishment of various theoretical equations which works well for the submerged deck and regular wave types but show much scatter and uncertainty in case of a deck that is above still water level (SWL). The present study aims to generate a solitary wave to represent an extreme wave condition like a tsunami in the numerical wave tank modeled using the open source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model REEF3D and to study the vertical impact force on the coastal bridge deck. A parametric study is carried out for increasing wave heights, girders spacing and depth for varying airgaps to analyze the effect of these parameters on the peak vertical impact force. It is observed that increasing the girder spacing and girder depth is effective in reducing the peak vertical impact force for the cases considered.

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In the recent past, coastal bridges have been subjected to critical damage due to extreme wave attacks during natural calamities like storm surge and tsunami. Various numerical and experimental studies have suggested different empirical equations for wave impact on deck. However, they do not account the velocities of the wave type properly, which requires a detailed investigation to study the impact of extreme waves on decks. Solitary wave assumption is more suitable for shallow water waves, while the focused wave has been used widely to represent extreme waves. The present study aims to investigate the focused wave impact on coastal bridge deck using REEF3D (Bihs et al., 2016).

Extreme wave impact due to tsunamis and storm surge create large wave heights causing destruction to coastal and offshore structures. These extreme waves are represented by focused waves in the present study and the impact on offshore deck is studied. Numerical wave tank used is modelled using open-source software REE3D, where the level set method is used to capture the air-water interface. Vertical impact force on offshore deck is computed and compared with the experimental results to validate the numerical model. Focused wave is generated by phase focusing a group of waves at a particular position and time. The nonlinearity of focused wave and its effect on the vertical impact force is quantified for different airgap and increasing wave heights. The steepness of this focused wave is increased to initiate phase focused breaking in the numerical wave tank, which is validated with experimental results of Ghadirian et al., 2016. The main purpose of this paper is to examine breaking focused wave group loads on the offshore deck and to study the impact on deck at different breaking locations. The positioning of the deck with respect to breaker location have shown that the maximum horizontal impact force due to breaking wave occurs when the plunging crest hits the deck side.

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