Experimental and numerical studies on the development of a new wave absorber

This paper proposes a new wave absorber made of flexible net structures. To test the efficiency of the proposed water absorber, experiments were done on wave absorbers of various lengths of and the thicknesses of the wave absorber. To perform a numerical modeling of the proposed wave absorber, damping terms were introduced in linearized free-surface boundary conditions. The length and the thickness of the wave absorber were modeled by the length and the coefficient of the damping zones. The boundary element method was adopted to solve the system. Series of experiments were performed to obtain the data for the coefficients of the damping term needed in numerical calculations. The predicted wave heights agreed very closely with those of experiments when the lengths of the incoming waves were within the order of the length of the wave absorber.