Distributed damping of tsunamis

Tsunamis are a major threat to coastal communities. One of the ways to avoid tsunami disasters is to use breakwaters to attenuate the incident tsunami energy. The incident tsunami energy is expected to be dissipated by induced wave breaking in the shallow water over the structure peak.

In this paper, a new method to attenuate the tsunami energy is described and investigated. This new concept dissipates tsunami energy by implementing small barriers into the water before the tsunami reaches the shore. The interaction of tsunami-like solitary waves with new submerged barriers has been investigated and their performance was compared with that of conventional breakwaters. We found that the new structure can be used as a tsunami wave attenuator.