Analysis of Shoreline Response due to Wave Energy Incidence Using Equilibrium Beach Profile Concept

Abstract

Dean's equilibrium beach profile formula was used to investigate the correlation between the static shoreline position and the incident wave energy. The effect of the longshore sediment transport was neglected, and the results showed the reasonable agreement compared with the field observations of Yates et al.(2009), which were conducted for almost 5 years on southern California beaches, USA. The shoreline response varies with the scale factor of Dean's equilibrium beach profile. This implies that the shoreline response could be simply estimated using the sampled grain size without laborious long-term field work. Therefore, the present study results are expected to be practically used for the layout design of submerged or exposed detached breakwaters although the further work is required for performance verification. In addition, after laborous mathematical reviews, the linear relation between incident energy and shoreline response, which was obtained from Yates’s field study, yielded a clear mathematical equation showing how the beach slope is related to the grain size.

Keywords

• Cross-shore sediment transport
• Scale factor
• Median grain size
• Beach erosion
• Detached breakwater