Numerical modelling of rubble mound damage under wave loading

Over the past few years new developments at Imperial College on the FEMDEM model Solidity (www.Solidityproject.com) have opened new areas of research in many directions. The most relevant one for the coastal engineering community has been the fluid-solid interaction. Work pursued in this direction lead to a robust two-way coupling being implemented between Solidity and Fluidity based on the immersed body method (Latham et al., 2009 and Xiang et al., 2012), but its very high computational cost makes it unsuitable for cases with large number of particles, such as rubble mounds.

Alternatively, a one-way coupling wave-structure interaction technology ("Wave Proxy") has been recently considered (REF). This PhD aims to revisit, further develop and validate the Wave Proxy technology, providing a new tool for designers and researchers to analyse damage on rubble mound structures with a much lower cost and shorter time scale than physical modelling.