Numerical modelling of the wave interaction with revetment breakwater built on reclaimed coral reef islands in the South China Sea—Experimental verification

The South China Sea (SCS) is an important channel, which plays a significant role in global economic trade and in the maintenance of world energy security. A series of artificial lands have been successfully built on the top of natural coral reefs in the SCS by the way of reclamation in recent years. In order to prevent those artificial lands from wave scouring and impacting, a great number of revetments and breakwaters have been constructed along the margin of these artificial lands. The revetment breakwaters have great significance and practical value to ensure the stability of these reclaimed lands, and to guarantee their normal long-term service performance. In this study, taking the reclamation project in the SCS as the engineering background, a computation model for the interaction between ocean waves, revetment breakwater and its calcareous coral sand foundation is established by taking the CFD solver OlaFlow as the computation platform which was developed based on the open source library OpenFOAM. Then this established computation model is verified by some laboratory testing data of wave profile and wave impact which have been measured in several wave flume physical model tests. The comparison between the testing data and the computational results indicates that the computation model established adopting OlaFlow can reliably simulate the wave generation, propagation, the dissipation of wave energy as well as the complicated interaction between ocean wave, the revetment breakwater and its calcareous coral sand foundation. This verification work will be a solid basis for the subsequent investigation of the interaction between severe ocean waves and the revetment breakwaters in large-scale, as well as the quantitative evaluation of the stability of the revetment breakwater build on reclaimed coral sand foundation in the SCS. •A computation model is established for the interaction between ocean waves, revetment breakwater and its calcareous coral sand foundation.•The Open source solver OlaFlow developed based on OpenFoam library is taken as the platform.•Several wave flume physical model tests are conducted to verify the established computation model.•It is indicated by the verification analysis that the established computation model is reliable.