• Journal of the Korean Society for Marine Environment & Energy
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.216-222
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• 2010

The structural methods used to protect coastal erosion are usually very expensive in construction as well as in spending on maintaining the structures from damage. Those structures like embankments, breakwaters, jetties etc. are commonly constructed with concretes (rigid methods) to protect coastal erosion. But those rigid methods are not effective always, because the wave energy and impact force on the structures could not be effectively reduced by those methods. For avoiding sediment erosion on coastal areas by the way of reducing wave energy, a flexible breakwater is introduced which will reduce energy and protect coastline economically and environmentally. The flexible device is a combination of flexible wire nets and stack of rings made of used vehicle tires and soft blades on surfaces. This flexible wire net is placed in between two stacks of rings. The stack of rings is mainly used to hold the flexible wire nets and the flexible wire net is mainly used to reduce wave energy and helps to deposit sediments in coastal area. For a field experiment study, the above-mentioned flexible breakwater of coastal protection has been set up at the Shuang-Chun coastal area in Tainan County since June 10, 2009. The length of the flexible device is 50.0 meters and the height is 2.0 meters. The function of the device has been examined by Typhoon Linfa during June 19~22, 2009 and by Typhoon Morakot during August 6~10, 2009. The result shows that the flexible breakwater has effectively trapped sediments and let them deposit on coastal. The depth of sediment deposition around the device was about 0.5 to 0.8 meters.