Design of a numerical wave tank and wave flume for low steepness waves in deep and intermediate water

Understanding the dynamics of wave energy converters and vortical structure of breaking waves are challenging hydrodynamic problems relevant to coastal engineering. These issues can be addressed at the laboratory scale through a specialized class of devices known as experimental wave flumes and numerical wave tanks (NWTs). This paper presents the process of design and development of a NWT and a wave flume that would eventually be applied for analyzing the hydrodynamics of breaking waves. The wave characteristics to be simulated have been selected from literature based on measurements carried out in the Gulf of Kutch, Gujarat. The NWT is based on a volume-of-fluid (VOF) formulation of the Navier-Stokes equations on a staggered grid using the mass-source function technique for wave generation. The flume is an acrylic tank equipped with a flap type wavemaker having dimensions adopted from the NWT. It is demonstrated in this work that the NWT and flume accurately generate non-linear wave trains in both intermediate as well as deep water with steepness H/lambda similar to 0.04. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecomons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).