CHARACTERIZATION OF DAMAGE PROGRESSION USING THE ALTERNATIVE SIMILARITY PARAMETER IN RUBBLE MOUND BREAKWATERS

The increasing need to protect coastal areas as climate change intensifies, makes it necessary to attain an accurate formulation for damage evolution in breakwater structures. Following dimensional analysis, recent studies have revealed the importance of the relative water depth in the transformation processes of sloped coastal structures, see Díaz-Carrasco (2019, 2020) for wave energy transformation, Moragues (2021)a for breaker types, Moragues (2021)b for runup and rundown, and Losada (2021) for damage progression. Those studies bring to front the fact that the alternative slope similarity parameter is a governing factor for wave energy transformation, flow characteristics and slope stability. The main objective of this study is to assess the joint effect of the relative wave height and the alternative similarity parameter (Díaz-Carrasco, 2020), on the slope stability, based on progression of breaker types, and the incident wave energy transformation. For this purpose, measurements of damage evolution from the start of damage until stabilization were made for a rubble-mound, non-overtoppable, homogeneous breakwater.