A STUDY OF HYDRAULIC WAVE BREAKERS
Keywords:
Littoral drift, Coastal, Hydraulic or Water-jet Wave breaker, manifold, nozzles, attenuationAbstract
Breaking of waves occurs on beaches and this result in erosion of beach which leads to long term littoral drift and a serious impact on coastline. Coastal structures designed for this purpose are usually quite massive and expensive to build. In the present study a special type of wave breaker known as hydraulic wave breaker was used to break waves so that wave dissipate the energy. A Hydraulic or Waterjet Wave breaker is formed by- forcing water through a series of nozzles mounted on a manifold pipe. The primary objective was to measure wave attenuation. It was found that waves with shorter wave lengths are easy to break; as anticipated the attenuation decreased for increase in water depth; Steep waves were easy to break; the manifold is placed in two different directions; one is placing on the bed and other placing opposite to incident wave on the surface level and the latter has more transmission. The average KT value observed for all such set of experiments when manifold placed bottom was found to be 0.423 i.e. the average breaking of waves was found to be 57.69 %. But when jet placed in opposite direction the average value of KT was found to be 0.309 i.e. the average breaking of waves is found to 69.14%. The increase in the percentage of breaking for the jet placed in opposite direction with respect to jet placed bottom is found to be 19.84 %.
