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...
The modeling and analysis of laboratory-generated nonlinear intermediate- to deep-water wave fields, using existing wavemaker theories and analysis tools, is one of the most challenging tasks in ocean science and engineering. On one hand, harmonics function (sine and cosine) -based wavemaker theories result in an inherent (linear) instability of the...
As coastal communities face increasing chronic and acute hazards, nature-based coastal engineering solutions have experienced a rapid growth in popularity and interest. Recent works on this topic have shown that “Green Infrastructure” may be effective at mitigating coastal hazards and therefore provide sustainable adaptation alternatives to traditional engineering solutions such...
Submerged aquatic vegetation (SAV) species, such as seagrasses, are highly valued in estuaries because of the many economic, ecological, and cultural services that they provide, including shelter for fisheries, minimizing water turbidity, and improving am-bient water quality. SAV can also alter its physical environment by attenuating wave and current velocities,...
Marine debris is a chronic and increasingly pervasive problem for coastal regions around the world. Debris poses environmental risks, threats to wildlife, and degradation of the natural environment. Recent research has shown the advantages of uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) for detection and recognition of marine debris, including the ability to...
This study utilizes probabilistic surrogate modeling techniques around San Diego Bay with an emphasis on naval infrastructure and operations to evaluate the impact of five global mean sea level rise scenarios (GMSLR). Spatially continuous total water levels (TWLs) are combined with a digital elevation model (DEM) of the region to...
Physical modelling is instrumental to the progression of coastal engineering research and our understanding of the offshore and nearshore environments. Scaled models are designed and built to be tested in coastal research laboratories, where a wave basin or flume generates the desired wave conditions for experimentation. The surrounding hydrodynamics of...
With rising sea levels and more frequent exposure to extreme storms, coastlines worldwide are vulnerable to increased erosion and loss of natural marsh lands. In an effort to lessen these impacts, there is a growing practice of adapting hard or “gray” coastline protection techniques to more nature-based features that promote...
Resulting from the action of wind over open water surfaces, water waves contain colossal amounts of energy that has not yet been harnessed. Seen as a very promising source for renewable energy generation, many studies have tried to make wave energy a cost competitive source by investigating optimal designs of...
Wave runup is an important physical process that affects nearshore sediment transport, coastal erosion, and flooding. Large and unexpected runup events can also be dangerous to beach goers. Extreme runup statistics are essential parameters used in engineering design of marine structures and in coastal management. Although the study of runup...
While real-time hybrid simulation has been utilized for structures subjected to seismic events for decades, its use in fluid-structure interaction problems is still a novel endeavor. Gathering data for cascading seismic and tsunami events is difficult due to space constraints in existing experimental facilities, complications regarding the application of scaling...
Converting energy from ocean waves is a challenging area for control theory application because of the nonlinear dynamics in various time scales. Generally, wave energy converter (WEC) control is applied in order to maximize power absorption, in the most common wave conditions, and subject to the devices’ physical constraints. Commonly,...
Wind energy has become a crucial resource in sustainably meeting increasing global energy demands. Recently, offshore wind energy has been gaining traction due to its higher gross resource and larger unclaimed real-estate relative to its onshore counterpart. Floating offshore wind turbines (FOWTs) are increasingly popular, particularly designs with semisubmersible platforms....
Ocean waves provide a promising source of renewable energy for the North American electric grid. However, ideal control of wave energy converters (WECs) requires perfect forecasting of future wave conditions, and waves can be unpredictable. This paper presents a comparison of three different prediction methods and analyzes their performance in...
Tsunami inundation of coastal communities can impose a wide array of forces on the
built environment. Forces generated by tsunami-driven debris damming have the potential to
cause failure of coastal structures and further accumulate flow-entrained debris. Since tsunami-resilient design standards were adopted by ASCE in 2016, debris damming considerations have...
The fluid impact forces on a bridge superstructure in horizontal and vertical directions due to tsunamis represented by solitary waves are investigated through a large-scale laboratory experiment and numerical simulations. The experiment is conducted in a two-dimensional wave basin using a 1:5 scaled reinforced concrete bridge deck model tested under...
Wave energy converters (WECs) are a broad class of emerging technology that converts hydrokinetic energy into some other useful form, such as electricity. The last stage in this transformation, the power take-off (PTO) subsystem, is often not experimentally evaluated until half-way through the recommended development process. This delay in evaluation...
Nearly 24% of Formerly Used Defense Sites (FUDS) containing military munitions are in the nearshore coastal zone with approximately 30% of those sites containing heterogeneous sediment compositions of gravel-sand. Previous exploration in munition mobility was performed on beaches of sandy or muddy bottoms leaving the influence of heterogeneous sediment properties...
Energy from offshore wind could provide substantial power generation if further utilized. One area of significant research focus is in developing floating offshore wind devices, which would allow for wind energy to be gathered in deep water where driven monopile turbines are infeasible. However, floating offshore wind is not currently...