Shallow water breaking wave loads on vertical cylinders

Many offshore and harbor structures are composed of cylindrical members. In this paper, the special case of shoaling breaking wave loads on a vertical cylinder is investigated in a tank. A segmented cylinder model with outer diameter of 0.204m and total height of 1m was built and tested. Also a 1:20 slope ramp was constructed in the tank to provide the shoaling effect. During the experiments the total force on each segment of the cylinder was measured and the water surface elevations at the cylinder and in deep water were also recorded. Studies on wave shapes and wave loads are presented here