Spurious Waves During Generation of Multi-Chromatic Waves in the Wave Tank in Shallow Water

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 i.e. model test in the laboratory. In the laboratory when multi-chromatic primary waves are generated the required bounded waves will be generated naturally at the difference frequencies. In addition to that several unwanted free waves are also generated. The free waves, having the same frequencies of the bounded waves 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 physical experiments 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 basin water depths in the range of 0.4m to 0.6m are used for the experiments. The peak wave periods also have varied from 1.133s to 2.145s. In the experiments multi-chromatic waves are used. The drive signals of the wave-makers 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.