In order to improve the coordination of coastal research and to develop multidisciplinary national and international cooperation the "Coastal Research Centre (FZK)" was established in 1996. Institutes of the University of Hannover and the Technical University of Braunschweig in Germany are working together with international partners on topics of Coastal Engineering and Hydrodynamics.
The most important infrastructure of the FZK is the Large Wave Channel (GWK). The Large Wave Channel is the largest facility of its kind world-wide for basic and applied research on coastal and ocean phenomena in large scale. Large-scale investigations in the GWK are necessary for the verification of small-scale test results and for the validation of theoretical approaches and numerical simulations of hydrodynamic and morphodynamic processes in coastal zones and for any kind of offshore structures.
Large-scale test are of peculiar interest for the Engineering design of structures under breaking wave attack. The study of the structure behaviour under the load of the interacting water/air mixture in a breaking wave requires large-scale test conditions.
