Nonlinear surface fit stability formula without any transition region for conventional breakwater design

Determining the optimum weight of the armor blocks is of vital importance in the design of conventional breakwaters. The widely used formulae in the literature include the transition region from plunging to surging waves. In this paper, it is aimed to investigate a new design formula without any transition region as an alternative to widely used Van der Meer formulae. The dimensionless parameters of Van der Meer formulae as well as newly generated variables are used as inputs. Nonlinear surface fit best subset regression model is used to find the optimum input combination that keeps the nonlinear relationships. All the input parameters, their second powers, and their two-way interactions are included in the regression analyses to obtain a nonlinear surface fit. Various goodness of fit statistics are applied to check the different perspectives of the model accuracy. It is demonstrated that the proposed model gives a realistic prediction of the stability number for critical data range. Especially for high values of stability number the proposed formula outperforms the benchmark formulae of Van der Meer and Etemad-Shahidi and Bonakdar. The other advantage is that it does not contain any transition region that depends on wave conditions. Besides, there is no need to include “number of waves” and “permeability” parameters into the equation.