CFD Evaluation of Regular and Irregular Breaking Waves on Elevated Coastal Buildings

This paper aims to evaluate the impact of both regular and irregular breaking waves on elevated houses with various freeboard levels. Computational fluid dynamic (CFD) analysis was utilized, and numerical outputs were validated based on available experimental tests. The validated CFD results in terms of vertical impact forces were compared with existing empirical formulas to better understand the applicability and accuracy of current methods. Turbulence sensitivity analysis shows that buoyancy-modified k-ω shear stress transport ( SST) model can accurately predict breaking wave characteristics in terms of the water surface elevation and surface pressures. The CFD model can predict front and bottom positive pressures for all freeboard levels as well as high bottom negative pressures and subsequent negative vertical forces for the elevated house model with zero freeboard. Regarding regular breaking waves, for the house with zero freeboard, the maximum discrepancies between the experimental and numerical results for the maximum positive and negative pressures are about 8