User‐Friendly PC‐Based Design Package for Gravity‐Type Seawalls

Abstract

Designing gravity‐type vertical seawalls involves repetitive design calculations in each block layer at different water levels under a variety of wave conditions. Incautious human errors that are fatal to the design may be introduced in calculations or in interpolations of design charts. In view of this, a computer‐aided‐design package is a real necessity. This paper presents the development of a user‐friendly program in BASIC language tailored for use on microcomputers for the computer‐aided design of such vertical seawalls. The program simulates the conventional manual design procedures, combining the relevant codes of practice and some heuristic rules of thumb from design experience. It automatically computes forces and moments due to surcharge and soil pressure behind the seawall together with wind‐generated wave forces, and it checks for the adequacy of the seawall configuration under a variety of loading cases.