Coastal engineering made easy - Evolving E-book

Coastal engineering made easy is a pretentious title for an evolving e-book that is meant to provide an introductory reference to students who are interested in the design of coastal structures for beach preservation and restoration. The concept of evolving e-book is conceived in order to benefit at most from modern web information. With respect to the traditional information that is conveyed by books, evolving e-books provide up-to-date guidance by using freely available documents, videos and pictures from the world wide web. It is an unconventional and perhaps not rigorous information, which presents the enormous advantage of being free, inexpensive, continuously updated basing on recent research and therefore timely. Each lecture is accompanied by links to Youtube videos from my face-to-face lectures to students. These videos are not edited and therefore sometimes redundant. However, I believe they represent an inestimable opportunity for students.

At the current level of development the e-book is still not complete. In particular, wave theory is treated at a basic level, currents are not treated and only main infrastructures are considered. The evolving e-book aims to profit from the interaction with the readers and in particular with students. I would appreciate very much receiving your comments and suggestions. In particular, please let me know if you see any mistake or missing information.

Table of contents

• Coastal Engineering - The learning process adopted in the course
• Coast management and beach design - Premise
• Beach hydrodynamics and morphodynamics
• Beach protection strategies and structures
• Mechanics of sea waves
• Wave transformation
• Sea wave monitoring
• Salt water intrusion
• Design of groins
• Stability of rock and concrete armour units
• Estimation of extreme wave height
• Design of breakwaters
• Nature based solutions for coastal protection

Exercises:

• Short introduction to R and R Studio
• Exercise: application of the CERC formula. Data files reporting the geometry of the shoreline and the wave forcing. Example of R file.
• Exercise: Estimation of extreme wave height. Example of R files.

Thanks for your attention and help.
Alberto Montanari