Porosity Effects on the Dispersion Relation of Water Waves through Dense Array of Vertical Cylinders

There is growing interest for water-wave flows through arrangements of cylinders with application to the performance of porous marine structures and environmental flows in coastal vegetation. For specific few cases experimental data are available in the literature concerning the modification of the dispersion equation for waves through a dense array of vertical cylinders. This paper presents a numerical study of the porosity effects on the dispersion relation of water waves through such configurations. To this aim, the sloshing problem in a tank full of vertical cylinders intersecting the free surface is studied using the finite element method, and the influence of the porosity on the wave number is quantified. On the basis of numerical results, a new modification of a dispersion relation for porous medium is suggested based on a wide range of collected data. Moreover, the domain of validity of this new dispersion relation is examined considering the number of cylinders and the extrapolation to the infinite medium.