The safety of coastal infrastructure has been a concern after the Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 and the Great East Japan Tsunami in 2011. The western coast of the United States is also exposed to tsunami hazards due to the Cascadia subduction zone. Therefore, it is critical to design coastal...
Offshore wind and wave energy have the potential to be significant sources of future global electricity production, reduce carbon emissions, decrease dependence on energy importation, and stimulate economic growth in coastal and remote areas. Fixed-foundation and floating offshore wind and wave energy technologies are at different stages of development, but...
The use of natural and nature-based features for coastal hazard mitigation, particularly emergent vegetation such as mangrove forests, have become increasingly popular. However, the protection that these systems can provide has not been fully quantified for engineering design, and the uncertainties in parameterized equations have not been fully defined. In...
Catastrophic earthquake and tsunami events that resulted in significant loss of life and property over the past two decades have raised the global awareness regarding the need to understand the response of communities and their built environment to multi-hazard extreme events. In recognition to this impending threat to the coastal...
A physical model study was performed to examine the forces and response of 1:6 scale wood-frame coastal residential structures subjected to storm surge and waves. An on-grade and an elevated specimen were tested and exposed to regular waves with varying water depths and wave heights to simulate Hurricane Sandy’s conditions....
A six degree of freedom (6DOF) point-absorber wave energy converter (WEC) called LUPA is being developed at Oregon State University. This research focused on analyzing a full- scale LUPA, called LUPA20, to answer the following questions: 1) How does a full-scale WEC perform due to various factors; 2) What are...
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...
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...
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...
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...