Semester of Graduation

Summer 2025

Degree

Master of Science in Civil Engineering (MSCE)

Department

Civil and Environmental Engineering (Coastal & Ecological Engineering)

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

Coastal vegetation attenuates waves in the nearshore zone and protects shorelines from storm surge and wave action. It also traps nutrients and sediment, and participates in the formation of land over longer time scales. These features of vegetation make it a common component of nature-based engineering projects. Interaction of water waves and flow with vegetation, however, can involve unsteady and turbulent flow, non-hyrdostatic pressure effects, and air entrainment that can hinder the use of simple parametric representations of vegetation drag. XBeach, a one- and two-dimensional production model applies reduced-order methods, prioritizing computational efficiency. Vegetation is represented in XBeach as a distributed, depth-integrated drag force, with the dimensionless drag coefficient taken from a single uniform steady flow condition. Recent laboratory experiments indicate that dam break waves in vegetation have complex microstructure that may reduce the vegetation drag coefficient by a factor of 2. To help understand the reduction in drag, this study uses the two-phase, three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics model from the Proteus toolkit. Concurrently, this study evaluates the impact of the parametric model used in XBeach on model error and computational efficiency.

Date

7-28-2025

Committee Chair

Kees, Chris E.

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