Waves are a very interesting feature of the natural world around us. Most people go to the ocean and think nothing of the intricacies of what is happening and the profound effect that waves have on shaping their world. Waves affect shoreline conditions, sediment transport and even air dispersion. Therefore it is important to have a good understanding of how waves impact the world around us and in order to do this we need to have access to repeatable coastal experiments to aid us in the study of structural interaction, heat exchange, and wave behavior. Therefore, the purpose of this project was to construct and refine a wave generation device to produce accurate wave modeling. And after this to run an experiment involving a deep water breaking wave.

One example of an experiment that can be done with this calibration is to create a breaking wave at a specific point along the flume with specific characteristics that we could run repeatedly. This would allow us to use these methods in future experiments where we wanted certain conditions to happen at certain points. One example would include a study of wave run-up on cylindrical objects. Knowing where the wave breaks would allow us to run repeatable experiments with the wave breaking in different places because we can control where that wave is breaking. Another useful application of this would be a study on submerged breakwater. We could run waves without the breakwater knowing precisely where they break and then position the breakwater in different locations and study the differences to the norm. Some other useful uses would also be shoreline interactions, including "surf-zone" transport of small-scale particulates, and bluff and shoreline erosion, with empirical study of wave interactions for the purpose of isolating and estimating destructive factors.

After laboratory calibration, the project centered around the generation of a deep water breaking wave. The installation of the finished wave maker, control programs and hardware allowed for the analysis of uniform and irregular waves in a controlled environment. The breaking wave study involved superposition of 32 linear waves, each with unique amplitude, phase, and frequency. All 32 waves shared the same crest position (1.5m) at a time of 10 seconds. The resultant was a single wave peak too steep resist plunging and causing the wave to break. A detailed analysis of the procedures we took to perform our laboratory calibration and deep water wave analysis can be seen on the following pages.

David Konkol (2006)

Forces on partially submerged bodies are of interest for future study, including various breakwater designs.

Cylinder run-up and wave forces as offshore design parameters.

Shoreline interactions, including "surf-zone" transport of small-scale particulates.

Bluff and shoreline erosion, with empirical study of wave interactions for the purpose of isolating and estimating destructive factors.