Laboratory Experiments on Long Waves Interacting with Rigid Vertical Cylinders

The impact of waves caused by storm surges or floods could lead to significant damage to marine and fluvial structures. Hydraulic forces add significant hydrodynamic loads on bridges built in coastal and fluvial environments; therefore, the effect of the wave impact on bridge substructures must be properly considered for the safe and cost-effective design of the piers. The use of laboratory-scale models is a direct approach to investigate the effects of long waves on simple structures, mimicking bridge piers. The present study describes a laboratory-scale model, where the propagation of two different long waves in a flume, in the presence of two rigid cylinders, was investigated. The velocity measurements were acquired by the Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) technique, providing instantaneous flow velocity vectors on 2D planes. For each experimental condition, the instantaneous velocity field close to the cylinders was analysed, in order i) to depict how it changes during the wave transit, and thus how the drag force acting on the cylinders could change, ii) to detect the spatial distributions of vorticity downstream. Some first interesting results have been obtained, showing a quite uniform distribution of the longitudinal velocity along the depth of the vertical plane upstream of the cylinders, with increasing values during the wave transit. No interactions in the central part of the flow downstream of the two cylinders was observed in the horizontal plane which are spaced approximately ten times their diameter. Finally, the vorticity has also been studied, displaying a phase-varying behaviour, which appears to lose symmetry during wave transit.