Wave-induced uplift pressure on berm revetment with Seabee slope

ABSTRACT

The berm revetment with a Seabee slope has been widely used in coastal defense structures. It is necessary to understand the distribution of wave-induced uplift pressure as it may cause serious damage to the cover layer of the revetment. Therefore, a series of physical experiments are carried out to quantify the uplift pressure on the revetment under various wave conditions. It is found that the freeboard of the berm is a key parameter which categorizes the laboratory results into two groups. Under negative freeboard, the distribution of uplift pressure on the upper slope is similar to that on the lower slope. Additionally, the maximum uplift pressure on both upper and lower slopes is strongly related to the surf-similarity parameter ξ_p. Under positive freeboard, the uplift pressure on the lower slope is significantly larger than that of the upper slope. The maximum uplift pressure on the lower slope is similar to that of the conventional rubble mound revetment. At last, Empirical equations are proposed to estimate the maximum relative uplift pressure under positive and negative freeboards.

KEYWORDS:

• Berm revetment
• Seabee slope
• wave action
• uplift pressure
• physical model

Acknowledgments

This work is partly supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2017YFC0405401), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51979098, 51979076), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2018B43514), and the Natural Science Fund for Colleges and Universities in Jiangsu Province (BK20181309). The authors sincerely appreciate the support of Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute for the laboratory tests.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China [2017YFC0405401], the National Natural Science Foundation of China [51979098, 51979076], the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [2018B43514, B200204017] and the Natural Science Fund for Colleges and Universities in Jiangsu Province [BK20181309].