Comparative study on breaking waves interaction with vertical wall retrofitted with recurved parapet in small and large scale

This paper presents the ISOPE-2022 conference comparative study on the interaction between breaking waves and a vertical wall with a recurved parapet. The experiments, on the basis of which the comparative study has been conducted, were carried out at small scale (1:8) in the Department of Ocean Engineering, IIT Madras, as well as at large scale (1:1) in the Großer Wellenkanal (GWK), Hannover. The paper discusses the qualitative and quantitative comparisons between 10 different numerical solvers from various universities across the world. The numerical solvers presented in this paper are the recent state of the art in the field; some are commercial, and some have been developed in-house by various academic institutes. The participating codes have been benchmarked for their ability to capture interactions between the incident waves and waves reflected from the seawall. The codes have also been benchmarked for their ability to replicate multiple loading cycles, in time domain, evaluated at selected pressure probe locations over the vertical wall and recurved parapet. The same pressure-time histories have also been compared in the frequency domain to evaluate the solvers’ capability to capture the multitude of harmonics characterizing the impact load. Furthermore, the values of peak impact pressure over five loading cycles have been compared to assess the overall robustness of the codes in simulating repeated impact events at model and prototype scales.