WAVE FORCES ON CROWN WALLS OF MOUND BREAKWATERS USING WAVE OVERTOPPING DISCHARGES

Mound breakwaters usually have a concrete crown wall on top to increase the crest freeboard decreasing the use of quarry material. The crown wall stability is crucial to control the wave overtopping discharges. The crown wall also provides enough space to improve the accessibility of pedestrians and vehicles as well as to install the necessary facilities for port operations. Although the crown wall has several failure modes, sliding and overturning are the most common when it is analyzed as a rigid body. The crown wall has to resist wave forces as well as earth pressures due to filter rocks and concrete armor units. Wave attack on the crown wall generates both up-lift and horizontal wave forces, which are difficult to measure at laboratory and prototype scale. Existing methods in literature to predict wave forces on crown walls are mainly based on laboratory tests, where the pressure distributions on the crown wall are usually extrapolated from punctual pressure measurements with pressure transducers. This study focuses the attention on the use of wave overtopping to estimate wave forces on crown walls.