Novel Assessment Tools for Wave Dampening by Marine and Coastal Vegetation

Coastal vegetation plays an important role in creating habitats, as a carbon sink and by dampening the waves as a natural form of coastal protection. This project aims to improve the understanding of wave dampening and related changes to boundary layers by vegetation through the use of novel simulation methods. Resolving many relatively small details like 100-1000s of plant stems in the same simulation framework as several wavelengths across the computational domain is still too computationally demanding using conventional computational fluid dynamics to geometry-resolving methods. ALFEA, a recently created tool based on Actuator Line Theory coupled with a Finite Element Structural Solver, shows promise in not only resolving the effect of large numbers of fixed stems, but also offers opportunities to investigate the effect of plant rigidity and deformation under fluid loading.

This project will firstly assess the accuracy and suitability of ALFEA for such simulations by performing validation studies against published data for static and flexible stems.