STRUCTURAL BEHAVIOR OF FLOATING BREAKWATERS WITH DIFFERENT MOORING LINES. APPLICATION TO MARINA CORUÑA

Floating breakwaters (FBW) are marine structures used to reduce high frequency agitation within fishing and recreational harbors, already protected against long period waves by anotherstructure, either natural or manmade. The development of a large number of new marinas and harbors around the world has led to a growing interest in the study of the structural behavior of FBW over the past two decades (Hales, 1981; Olivier, 1994; Cox, 2006). Prototype tests havebeen carried out and there have also been efforts to formulate the forces that appear betweenpontoons, both analytically and numerically, resulting in specific design programs for thesemarine structures. However, physical modeling of breakwaters in current use is rare. In this study, we offer adescription of a model of a floating breakwater already installed and operating at Marina Coruña(43º22´3´´N, 8º23´13´´0) as well as the dynamic results obtained by simulating both elastic and non-elastic types of mooring lines. It is innovative in the field of marine hydraulics due to thefact that 4 degrees of freedom of forces and moments were able to be recorded between twomodules of a floating breakwater. These results include wave transmission and most of all, the structural response of the breakwater recorded both at the mooring lines and in between twoadjacent modules. The presented work is part of a project entrusted by the Spanish Ministry of Research andInnovation and the Program of Research, Development and Technological Innovation of Galicia (regional government), and was carried out by the Water and Environmental Engineering Group of the University of A Coruña at the R+D Centre in Building and Civil Engineering of this university (CITEEC).

Keywords:

Floating Breakwater , Mooring System , Marina Coruña , Galicia , Spain