3D Modeling of Morphological Changes Using Representative Waves

At present, there are a few models to calculate 3D morphology change that have been thoroughly validated and are useful to the engineering community. The 3D models typically consume substantial computational time and resources, which can pose as one of the limitations of applying such models. To overcome this limitation, the present paper introduces an approach for calculating representative waves to be used instead of time series wave climate. The calculation of representative waves is done by assuming equivalence of wave energy and longshore or cross-shore sediment transport between representative and real waves. In this study, a 2D hydrodynamic model and a 3D morphological model are applied with representative waves to calculate morphologies between fishtail groins. It was found that the use of two representative waves can reduce the computational time from 480 hrs using classical methods to 2 hrs, thus saving computational time while providing satisfactory results with typical values of 0.85 and 0.19 m for the statistical measures EI and RMSE, respectively.