Individual Violent Overtopping Events: New Insights

Wave overtopping is essentially a discrete process in which disastrous consequences can arise from the effect of one or two waves; few of the thousands of previous experiments have focused on the properties of individual events. The violent impacts of water waves on walls create velocities and pressures (impulse and oscillations) much larger than those associated with the propagation of ordinary waves under gravity.

The present investigation has gathered detailed measurements of surface elevations, impact velocities, impact pressures and individual overtopping volumes on vertical and sloped seawalls from highly controlled laboratory experiments to increase the qualitative and quantitative understanding of infrequent events.

Numerical studies were also carried out to compare with the experimental results. Initial experimental and numerical results of this project (Fundamentals of Overtopping from Individual Violent Water-Wave Impacts) are presented in this paper.