Data of boulder transport experiment in super-large wave flume

Abstract

Several boulder transport formulations are available, which are based on the transport distance of coastal boulders to provide estimates of the hydraulic processes from past storm wave and tsunami events. However, experiments in a small wave tank generally underestimate the transport distance of boulders due to the limited size of the input waves and scaling issues, thus additional validation based on large-scale laboratory tests is necessary to be conducted. We conducted laboratory experiment of boulder transport in a super-large wave flume of 205 m length. In this study, we used 0.35-0.53 kg of rectangular blocks for our experiments. The observed transport distance of the rectangular blocks that made of cement and limestone for our experiments was 45 m in maximum. We also observed block velocity that its transport mode was changed sliding to rolling or saltation. The scale and flow velocity in our experiment is far higher than in other previous studies. We obtained high quality data of block velocity and transport modes for the validation of the formulations and the development of the new formulations. This contributes to research of coastal boulders formed by tsunami or storm wave.