Wave Transmission Characteristics of the Rapidly Installed Modular Floating Breakwaters

Many military and naval operations have required some kind of wave attenuating system that can
be installed rapidly for the operations to be carried out smoothly and be uninstalled when the
operations have finished. This has led to the need to develop a more flexible floating breakwater
which can serve the purpose. Thus, modular floating breakwaters with Lego-based design have
been proposed due to their rapid installation characteristic. This research study aimed to study
the wave transmission characteristics of the rapidly installed modular floating breakwaters in
regular waves. The two main objectives in this study were to evaluate the effects of breakwater
width and draft on wave transmission characteristics of the rapidly installed modular floating
breakwaters and also to compare wave attenuation performance of the rapidly installed modular
floating breakwaters of different irregular configurations. This study was a physical modellingbased
project which had 19 breakwater models with a total number of 171 test runs. Each model
was tested against 3 different wave periods (0.8s, 1.2s and 1.6s) and 3 different stroke
adjustments (40mm, 120mm and 200mm) that produced incident wave heights ranging from 1cm
to 6.5cm at a constant water depth of 0.3m. The wave attenuation performance of modular
floating breakwaters were evaluated and analyzed based on wave transmission coefficient, Ct
value.