The attenuation of large hydraulic bores, such as the ones induced by the breaking of tsunamis, near the shoreline, can result in massive damage to infrastructure and significant loss of lives. Man-made structures such as seawalls and breakwaters are beneficial for restricting the inland propagation of waves, but may be costly and ineffective during large tsunami events. Natural structures, such as coastal forests, may provide a reasonable method for the protection of coastal regions, as they are capable of attenuating the bore flow and restricting the movement of debris. This paper will present the results of a numerical model based on the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method that was used to simulate the attenuation and propagation of a hydraulic bore on a coastal forest. The SPH method uses a Lagrangian approach which allows for an accurate reproduction of the bore propagation, breaking and splashing as well as alleviating problems that may occur for traditional computational methods. The open source-code software (DualSPHysics), which uses the Graphical Processing Unit for faster computational time, was used to run the simulations. The model was used to determine a relation between the number and density of the vegetation elements (such as trees) and their effect on the bore attenuation and velocity.
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