WAVE IMPACT ON BREAKWATER ARMOR BLOCKS USING IBM-DEM CFD COUPLING

The stability of armor units against wave action is a critical issue for coastal and harbor breakwaters. Most of the time, the breakwater stability is determined based on semi-empirical design formulae, as well as with experimental campaigns on scale models in wave basins. The present work aims to approach breakwater stability through a numerical deterministic approach using a DEM- CFD (Discrete Element Method – Computational Fluid Dynamics) method which simulates the individual motion of armor units inside a fluid solver. The fluid is solved using EDF Eulerian-Eulerian CFD code neptune_cfd, and the contacts between blocks are solved using the DEM code Grains3D (Wachs et al., 2012). The solids are modeled inside neptune_cfd using an IBM (Immersed Boundary Method) technique with discrete forcing.