Numerical Simulations of Waves Breaking over a Rectangular Submerged Reef Consisting of a Double Step: Analogies with massive Natural Wave Breaking over Abrupt Bathymetries

Abstract

The aim of this article is not to study any practical design for a breakwater device nor to show the evidence of a particular event when waves break over a varying bathymetry, but to promote a paper showing an interesting idea of wave decomposition prior to impact, used in an experimental and numerical study published by Yasuda et al.

Introduction to the Special Issue on Numerical Methods and Applications for Waves in Coastal Environments

“…The paper by Desmons and Lubin [6] investigates a new type of breaker, proposed by [20] by detailing several geometric aspects which lead to the unusual size and behavior of some very large plunging jets generated when waves break above some drastic changes of bathymetry. The authors investigate all geometrical aspects of the breaking process, to propose a classification of the breaker types which were observed in the numerical results.…”

“…Problems arising from fundamental research and real applications in coastal environments demand accurate descriptions of both breaking inception and the details of the breaking process [1,[12][13][14]16,18]. The directions of research that the works of this issue attempt to contribute are the identification and classification of different type of wave breaking [6], the reduction of the computational cost in the accurate description of wave breaking using non hydrostatic Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations [10], and the understanding of the wave breaking closures for Boussinesq type models [11].…”