Numerical Study of Bamboo Breakwater for Wave Reduction

Flood inundation and shoreline erosion have long occurred in Sayung, Demak area, the northern coast of Central Java Province, Indonesia. The people of Sayung planted mangroves to reduce the flood inundation and shoreline erosion in that area. They built the bamboo array to protect the juvenile mangroves from incoming waves. The bamboo acts as a breakwater and is considered an environmentally friendly permeable structure to reduce wave energy and stimulate sedimentation. This paper discusses three bamboo arrays’ effectiveness in wave reduction using Numerical Wave Tank (NWT). The interaction of regular waves with a permeable structure comprising a single row of vertical circular poles was conducted based on the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method. The effect of different waves and structural dimensions on the permeable structure was investigated based on the structure’s transmission coefficient (Kt) performance. The investigations have revealed that structures with the combination of Vertical-Horizontal formation (VH) attenuate more wave energy than Vertical Only (VO) and the combination of Vertical-Diagonal formation (VD). As the wave steepness increases, the transmission coefficient decreases. Likewise, the transmission coefficient (Kt) is decreasing when the wave height is increasing. On the other hand, the transmission coefficient (Kt) increases as the wave period increases. As the structure spacing ratio between end-to-end and center-to-center spacing (e/S) rises, the transmission coefficient (Kt) also increases. The diameter (D) has a slight effect on the transmission coefficient (Kt). However, the center-to-center spacing (S) has a more significant impact than the diameter on the transmission coefficient, affecting an inclination on the transmission coefficient (Kt) when center-to-center spacing (S) goes up.