Identifications of Spurious Waves in the Wave Tank With Shallow Water

Abstract

Accurate generation of the primary waves and the reproduction of the group-induced second-order low and high frequency waves have been considered essential for physical model test in the laboratory. In the laboratory when bi-chromatic primary waves are generated the required bounded waves will be generated naturally at the difference frequency. In addition to that several unwanted free waves are also generated. The free waves, having the same frequency of the bounded wave are reproduced due to mismatch of the boundary conditions at the wave paddle. The other two types of free waves are due to the wave paddle displacement and the local disturbances. We carried out an extensive experimental program to identify the second order spurious waves in shallow water in the Offshore Engineering Basin (OEB) at the Institute for Ocean Technology (IOT) of National Research Council (NRC) Canada. In the experiments water depths are used in the range of 0.3m to 0.8m. The wave periods also have varied from 0.9s to 2.22s. In the experiments mono- and bi-chromatic waves are used. The drive signals of the wave-maker are generated using first-order and second-order wave generation techniques. Total 14 wave probes are used to capture the data in the wave tank. A NRC-IOT code is used to isolate the primary waves, the bounded waves and the unwanted free waves from the measured data at each wave probe. The measured data are analyzed in this paper to illustrate the differences in the waves generated by two different generation techniques.