Directing Shallow-Water Waves Using Fixed Varying Bathymetry Designed by Recurrent Neural Networks

Directing shallow-water waves and their energy is highly desired in many ocean engineering applications. Coastal infrastructures can be protected by reflecting shallow-water waves to deep water. Wave energy harvesting efficiency can be improved by focusing shallow-water waves on wave energy converters. Changing water depth can effectively affect wave celerity and therefore the propagation of shallow-water waves. However, determining spatially varying bathymetry that can direct shallow-water waves to a designed location is not trivial. In this paper, we propose a novel machine learning method to design and optimize spatially varying bathymetry for directing shallow-water waves, in which the bathymetry is assumed fixed in time without considering morphodynamics. Shallow-water wave theory was applied to establish the mapping between water wave mechanics and recurrent neural networks (RNNs). Two wave-equivalent RNNs were developed to model shallow-water waves over fixed varying bathymetry. The resulting RNNs were trained to optimize bathymetry for wave energy focusing. We demonstrate that the bathymetry optimized by the wave-equivalent RNNs can effectively reflect and refract wave energy to various designed locations. We also foresee the potential that new engineering tools can be similarly developed based on the mathematical equivalence between wave mechanics and recurrent neural networks.