Coastal Engineering Design

Covers wave transformation in shallow water, sediment transport, shoreline evolution, and the design of coastal protection: seawalls, revetments, breakwaters, groins, beach nourishment and nature-based approaches.

Design is treated as a problem in changing conditions. A structure specified for a hundred-year design life sits in a system where sediment supply, storm frequency and mean water level are all moving. The structure does not fail; the assumptions do. Students are required to state the design assumptions explicitly and to test their scheme against a projection range rather than a single value.

The course also treats the downdrift consequence directly. Protection that performs well in isolation commonly relocates erosion along the coast, frequently into another jurisdiction, and a design submission that ignores this is marked as incomplete.