Estimation of incident and reflected waves in regular wave experiments

Abstract

This paper presents a laboratory technique for measurement of reflected waves by a submerged horizontal plate. A simple method is proposed to decompose the composite wave record obtained from the wave reflection experiments in the wave flume. The data collected were used to compute the reflected wave height by means of two and three probe methods proposed by other investigators and compared with the directly computed reflected wave using the measured incident wave. The experiment was carried out for a horizontal plate of 1 m length spanning the full width of the flume with wave periods ranging from 0.8 to 1.8 sec with 0.1 sec increments and wave heights of 5, 10 and 15 cm. The methods using two and three probes with phase measurement yield better results than the three probe method without phase measurement, and in general they have a wider range of application. The method using three probes without the phase measurement generally fails due to numerical instability of the scheme. The results obtained by the proposed method are compared with the two and three probe methods and a comparative analysis of the four methods is presented and discussed.