Wave loads on rubble mound breakwater crown walls

Crown walls are primarily built to reduce wave overtopping of mound breakwaters. Several methods have been proposed to calculate wave loads on the crown wall, e.g., Iribarren and Nogales [Iribarren, R., Nogales, C., 1964. Obras Marı́timas. Dossat (Ed.), Madrid, 376 pp.], Jensen [Jensen, O.J., 1984. A Monograph on Rubble Mound Breakwaters. Danish Hydraulic Institute] and Günbak and Gökce [Günbak, A.R., Gökce, T., 1984. Wave screen stability of rubble-mound breakwaters. International Symposium of Maritime Structures in the Mediterranean Sea. Athens, Greece, pp. 2.99–2.112]. In this paper, a new method based on those previous results, and on further experimental work, using monochromatic waves, is presented. The application of the new method requires waves breaking on the armour layer; i.e., only broken waves will reach the crown wall. The method is extended to irregular waves via the hypothesis of equivalence introduced by Saville [Saville, T., 1962. An approximation of the wave run-up frequency distribution. Proc. 8th International Conference on Coastal Engineering, Mexico City] and is applied to the crown walls of Gijón and Bilbao breakwaters in Spain. The comparison of the probability force distributions obtained by the present method to that measured by Burcharth et al. [Burcharth, H.F., Frigaard, P., Berenguer, J.M., Gonzalez, B., Uzcanga, J., Villanueva, J., 1995. Design of the Ciervana breakwater, Bilbao. In: T. Telford (Ed.), Proc. 4th Coastal Structures and Breakwaters, Chap. 3. Institution of Civil Engineers] and Jensen (1984) is relatively good.