Nowadays it is needed to apply marine space by the shortage of land and resources. To make up for defects of the existing breakwater, many of studies were performed for the floating breakwater which has no restriction of the ground of sea bottom and the water depth.
However, due to the difficulty of the investigation in the whole flow and turbulence structure around floating breakwater, the studies of floating breakwater have been focused on the problems of wave reflection, wave transmission, permeability, and the safety of a structure. In view of the quality of the sea or the environment, it is important to elucidate the vertical flow and turbulence structure around the floating breakwater. The purpose of this study is to understand the mechanism of the vertical flow and turbulence structure induced by the wave interaction with the floating breakwater.
The results of numerical modeling combined with the VOF method and κ-ε turbulence model based RANS(Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes) equation were compared to the experimental results with Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). In comparison with the experimental results, the numerical modeling presents the vortices and turbulence generated at the corner of a structure by the flow separation. This numerical simulation is, also, able to apply to the turbulence transportation due to the wave interaction with bluff body such as rectangular cylinder.
Recently, a lot of industries have been performing with pointing harbors by appearing extra-large ships and high efficiency of loading equipments. The floating breakwater such as a caisson breakwater have been studied on its performance related with the wave transmission and reflection coefficients, but the problems induced by the vortex and turbulence due to the wave interaction with a structure has the limitation to be researched through the numerical and experimental methods.
