Numerical Study of the Behavior of Multiple Floating Breakwater

Abstract

Floating breakwater system to reduce high waves has been used in recent years because it has advantages of sea water circulation and lower cost especially in deep sea. Now, plans are proposed to construct very large offshore structures of floating type such as a floating airport. Therefore, the effectiveness and capability of wave protection of floating breakwater in oceans are investigated in this paper. A new multiple floating breakwater, which consists of several single floating breakwaters, is proposed in this paper. The separated region method is modified to calculate resulting wave reflection and transmission coefficients of the multiple floating breakwater. A mathematical model based on the separated region method is obtained to evaluate the performance. Numerical results based on the proposed method are compared with several previous numerical and analytical results. Good agreement is found between the present results and others. The transmission coefficients of the multiple floating breakwater are searched thoroughly, and interesting properties of the multiple floating breakwater have been obtained. These properties are very important in designing the multiple floating breakwater in ocean engineering.