FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF DEZHPOD® ARMOUR UNIT UNDER STATIC LOADING AND COMPARING WITH XBLOC®

Concrete armour units specially the Third generation armour units, the units are placed randomly in a single layer, are more cost efficient for rubble mound breakwaters. Often the lack of indigenous technical knowledge and implementation of this type of armor is unnoticed. Dezhpod® armour unit has been launched by Sazeh Pardazi Iran Consulting Engineers [1] as the first Iranian concrete armour, based on processing experiences in recent years of design, construction and operation of onshore and offshore structures formed in Iran. Thedevelopment studies of this armour began about seven years ago. Dezhpod® is used in a single layer and its stability is based on the interlocking between adjacent blocks. The high interlocking quality of Dezhpod® has been proven in laboratory tests, and its suitable geometry showed satisfying hydraulic and structural stability. The ease of fabrication and placement are the other advantages of this armour unit. As Dezhpod® is randomly placed in a single layer, it is comparable to the other single layer armour units such as Xbloc® [2].The breakwater armour unit Xbloc® has been launched by Delta Marine Consultants and is used in some Iranian projects. Unfortunately, some examples of this armourfailure has been observed that were attributed by breakage of the armour units. For instance Figure 1 shows examples of Xbloc® Armour units in Anzali port, Iran, which is broken due to wave impact. The observed armour breakage for Xbloc® in above mentioned project, made the Dezhpod® developers to investigate the structural resistance of this armour unit.In this study a set of structural analysis was performed to investigate the tensile stress distribution in Dezhpod® armour unit comparing to its well-known competitorXbloc®. To this aim, three-dimensional (3D) Finite