Winyu Rattanapitikon and Romanee Karunchintadit

pp. 139 - 148

Abstract

The irregular wave height transformation has been a subject of study for decades because of its
importance in studying beach deformations and the design of coastal structures. The energy dissipation is
an essential requirement in the computation of wave height transformation. During the past few decades,
many dissipation models have been developed, for regular wave see Rattanapitikon and Leangruxa (2001).
This study is undertaken to examine the accuracy of 7 existing dissipation models for irregular breaking
waves, i.e., the models of Battjes and Janssen (1978), Thornton and Guza (1983) (2 models), Battjes and Stive
(1984), Southgate and Nairn (1993), Baldock et al. (1998), and Rattanapitikon and Shibayama (1998).
The coefficients of the models are re-calibrated and the overall accuracy of the models is compared. A large
number and wide range of wave and bottom topography conditions (total 385 cases from 9 sources of
published laboratory data) are used to re-calibrate and compare the accuracy of the 7 models. It appears that
the model of Rattanapitikon and Shibayama (1998) gives the best prediction for general cases.