Experimental investigation on the characteristics of solitary and elongated solitary waves passing over vegetation belt

This study investigates the wave-vegetation interaction of elongated solitary waves and solitary waves. The energy reduction offered by the vegetation from the elongated solitary waves and solitary waves considering them as extreme events like storm surge and tsunami, has been studied. The energy contained in elongated solitary waves and solitary waves were estimated using the spectral density method. Due to longer period, the energy contained by an elongated solitary wave will be higher than the solitary wave for the same H/d ratio. However, the wave energy reduction percentage of elongated waves was the same as that of solitary waves passing over the vegetation belt. The maximum energy reduction observed through this experiment is about 25%. The attenuation characteristics of the waves were observed to be influenced by submergence ratio, relative vegetation width, and steepness ratio on the incident wave. In this study, a modified submergence ratio has been proposed considering the flow characteristics of the waves passing over the vegetation. This was proposed based on the observations from the experimental study on wave attenuation characteristics, and considering the results from the previous literature. An empirical equation for estimating the wave height attenuation depending on the above-mentioned dimensionless parameters are proposed based on multivariate nonlinear regression analysis.