Fluid Structure Interactions Occuring At a Flexible Vertical Wall Impacted By a Breaking Wave.

Experiments are performed in the flume of Ecole Centrale Marseille (ECM) in order to analyze the fluid structure interactions occurring at a flexible vertical wall impacted by a breaking wave. Characteristics of this flume are perfectly suitable to this kind of experiments: transparent walls and competencies in PIV techniques at great frequency. This study leads to create a large database for validation of models. Those models are devoted to highly nonlinear wave generation on one side and devoted to structural behavior on the other side. Strong fluid structure interactions occur and therefore those models must be coupled. Theoretical and numerical developments are then presented. Free surface tracking techniques are implemented. The corresponding hydrodynamic codes are based on potential theory and require very few computational resources. The structural models are based on linearized elasticity theory of thin shells.