Much like wind energy in its early years, marine energy has vast potential, and wave energy converter (WEC) concepts are constantly in development. Consequently, wave energy faces many challenges for expansion and has a wide-ranging design space of WEC concepts. The large design space demands new methods for understanding the...
Floating offshore wind energy is anticipated to become a competitive source of renewable energy by the late 2020s, but the industry must reduce costs and uncertainties associated with the technology to do so. Identifying solutions to these problems frequently relies on computational modeling, which presents technical shortcomings limiting the versatility...
In coastal and ocean engineering, understanding the ocean environment and the forces from waves, tsunamis and waterborne debris on structures and floating bodies is an important aspect of designing safe and effective infrastructure. Understanding the impact of these forces on structures becomes an important question in the design process. Answering...
The Large Wave Flume at the O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory houses a piston wavemaker with a built-in active absorption system designed by MTS Systems Corporation. The performance of the active absorption system has not been properly assessed yet. This thesis evaluates the performance of the MTS active absorption system...
The formation of beach scarps is a challenging morphodynamic phenomenon that the coastal community has yet to capture in coastal change models. Understanding scarp formation is crucial to accurately predicting coastal erosion and vulnerability during extreme events, as models without parameters for scarp formation and development severely underpredict total erosion...
The impact of tsunamis on coastal structures gained great a new impetus following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. While several experimental programs have been performed to gain a fundamental understanding, numerical models are needed to study additional features that cannot all be tested...
Wave Energy Converters (WEC) have great potential to help meet global energy demands, but even a single device can be challenging to model. Although most WEC concepts are modelled, many have been simplified with assumptions that do not accurately capture the true dynamics of the system. For this reason, data-driven...
In view of the widespread damage to coastal bridges during recent tsunamis (2004 Indian Ocean and 2011 in Japan) large-scale hydrodynamic experiments of tsunami wave impact on a bridge with open girders were conducted in the Large Wave Flume at Oregon State University. The main objective was to decipher the...