Hydraulic and earth engineering – Bank – shore – or bed protection – Wave or flow dissipation
Patent
1987-08-13
1989-07-25
Corbin, David H.
Hydraulic and earth engineering
Bank, shore, or bed protection
Wave or flow dissipation
405 30, E02B 306
Patent
active
048507423
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
It is known that very numerous sectors of activity depending on the industry of the sea would draw considerable profit from the existence of a swell attenuator device which is of inexpensive construction, requiring only minimum maintenance, resistant to bad weather, not hindering navigation of boats of low tonnage, and repecting the aesthetics of a site and the integrity of the marine environment.
Among the possible applications of such a device, the following may be mentioned by way of non-limiting examples: installations already existing and likely to give signals of fatigue, types, dykes, breakwaters and immersed storage tanks, etc. . .), assembling of prefabricated elements, recovery of layers of hydrocarbon, etc. . .) and even possibly,
A large number of devices tending to produce effects of this type has already been proposed. In particular, a virtually exhaustive review of the studies already made on this subject is to be found in Report R 727 published in May 1971 by the Marine Department of the United States of America.
However, the heretofore proposed devices call upon material elements which generally employ vertical obstacles or damping effects of viscous orgin. Now, the swell being an undulatory phenomenon, it would appear more promising to exploit, in order to envisage attenuation thereof, means resulting from conventional mathematical calculations intervening in these undulatory phenomena.
A first attempt was made in this direction, and formed the subject matter of a first Patent by the Applicants, precisely envisaging a completely novel type of method, designed from the notion of a phenomenon identified under the name of "oscillating wall of water" and of which the creation, based on theoretical calculations of undulatory phenomena of this type, already made it possible to obtain in practice the desired results by means of material elements which are unquestionably simple, inexpensive and of small size.
To that end, this prior method consisted in creating, from the incident swell, a phenomenon likewise of undulatory nature, materializing in the form of an "oscillating wall of water" generating a system of waves of radiations of which the composition with the diffracted wave present downstream of said "oscillating wall of water", gave a resultant which was zero or of low amplitude.
From the practical standpoint, the means proposed for carrying out this method consisted of a parallelepipedic caisson, disposed at a certain depth perpendicularly to the incident swell and having a mass such that it enters into oscillation with an amplitude and a phase provoking cancellation or considerable reduction of the diffracted wave, present downstream of said caisson, and this for a wide range of periods of the incident swell, this caisson being able to be constituted by a simple envelope filled with the water of the enviornment, and whose dimensions are such that said mass of the caisson is equal to the mass of the volume of water displaced and said envelope is subjected only to vertical efforts, and even not to possess lateral walls, with the result that, finally, said "oscillating wall of water" is obtained by immersion of at least one slab of small thickness with respect to its other dimensions, at a distance from the sea-bed such that the mass of water located between said plate and the sea-bed is equal to said mass of the caisson and said slab is subjected only to vertical efforts.
The drawback of this solution contained in its very principle is of not really attenuating the phenomenon of swell downstream of the device, but only of composing it with a phenomenon also produced downstream of said device, with the result that the obtaining of a zero or low-amplitude resultant was dependent on certain factors which, if they were not respected, risked rendering the device inoperative.
The present invention aims at overcoming this drawback thanks to a method in which the effects of attenuation of the swell are created no longer downstream but upstream of the means employed, with the result that the swell
REFERENCES:
patent: 3490239 (1970-01-01), Vincent
patent: 3538710 (1970-11-01), Tourmen
patent: 3851476 (1974-12-01), Edwards
Bouchet Rene
Manzone Jean M.
Corbin David H.
Gouvernement Monegasque, Le Service des Travaus
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