Generating stable solitary waves with a piston-type wavemaker

Abstract

The generation of stable and pure solitary waves in large-scale experimental flumes and numerical models is the focus of this study. Such waves give a better description of the target wave amplitude, has minimal amplitude dissipation during propagation and has negligible trailing waves. In the present study, the two solitary wave generation methodologies, namely, Goring's Method (GM) and the Malek-Mohammadi and Testik Method (MMTM), described in Goring (1979) and Malek-Mohammadi and Testik (2010) respectively, have been used to examine the solitary wave solutions of Boussinesq, Rayleigh, Grimshaw and Fenton, both experimentally and numerically for three different relative wave height (ε), ratios of 0.1, 0.3 and 0.6. Numerical modeling is done within a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) framework developed in Valizadeh and Rudman (2017). For each ε value, we have compared the experimental and numerical results in terms of the free surface profiles and the phase speeds to give recommendations for the solitary wave solution and the generation methodology that demonstrates the best performance. Our results indicate that the Rayleigh solitary wave solution gives more accurate profiles in both experiments and numerical simulations. With respect to wave generation methodology, the MMTM gives the best results in the experiments, whereas, the GM describes the target waves better in our numerical SPH simulations.