Predicting the breaking strength of gravity water waves in deep and intermediate depth

DOI10.1017/JFM.2018.352MaRDI QIDQ4582931zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Morteza Derakhti, Michael L. Banner, James T. Kirby

Publication date 27 August 2018

Published in Journal of Fluid Mechanics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.03586

zbMATH Keywords

air/sea interactionssurface gravity waveswave breaking

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Water waves, gravity waves; dispersion and scattering, nonlinear interaction (76B15) Waves for incompressible viscous fluids (76D33) Liquid-gas two-phase flows, bubbly flows (76T10)

Abstract: We revisit the classical but as yet unresolved problem of predicting the strength of breaking 2-D and 3-D gravity water waves, as quantified by the amount of wave energy dissipated per breaking event. Following Duncan (1983), the wave energy dissipation rate per unit length of breaking crest may be related to the fifth moment of the wave speed and the non-dimensional breaking strength parameter $b$. We use a finite-volume Navier-Stokes solver with LES resolution and volume-of-fluid surface reconstruction (Derakhti and Kirby 2014a, 2016) to simulate wave packet evolution, breaking onset and post-breaking evolution for representative cases of wave packets with breaking due to dispersive focusing and to modulational instability. The present study uses these results to investigate the relationship between the breaking strength parameter $b$ and the breaking onset parameter $B$ proposed recently by Barthelemy et al. (2018). The latter, formed from the local energy flux normalized by the local energy density and the local crest speed, simplifies, on the wave surface, to the ratio of fluid speed to crest speed. Following a wave crest, when $B$ exceeds a generic threshold value at the wave crest (Barthelemy et al., 2018), breaking is imminent. We find a robust relationship between the breaking strength parameter $b$ and the rate of change of breaking onset parameter, $dB/dt$ at the wave crest, as it transitions through the generic breaking onset threshold ($Bsim0.85$), scaled by the local period of the breaking wave. This result significantly refines previous efforts to express $b$ in terms of a wave packet steepness parameter, which is both difficult to define robustly and which does not provide a generically accurate forecast of the energy dissipated by breaking.

Recommendations

• Wave breaking onset and strength for two-dimensional deep-water wave groups
• On a unified breaking onset threshold for gravity waves in deep and intermediate depth water
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• Inertial energy dissipation in shallow-water breaking waves

Cites work

• Breaking-onset, energy and momentum flux in unsteady focused wave packets
• Bubble entrainment and liquid-bubble interaction under unsteady breaking waves
• Evaluation of a deep-water wave breaking criterion
• On a unified breaking onset threshold for gravity waves in deep and intermediate depth water
• Short-crested wave breaking
• Spectral and statistical properties of the equilibrium range in wind-generated gravity waves
• Wave breaking onset and strength for two-dimensional deep-water wave groups
• Wave-breaking and generic singularities of nonlinear hyperbolic equations

Cited in

(15)

• Wave breaking in undular bores with shear flows
• Breaking Waves in Deep and Intermediate Waters
• Inertial energy dissipation in shallow-water breaking waves
• Laboratory studies of the role of bandwidth in surface transport and energy dissipation of deep-water breaking waves
• On a unified breaking onset threshold for gravity waves in deep and intermediate depth water
• Focusing deep-water surface gravity wave packets: wave breaking criterion in a simplified model
• Extreme long waves over a varying bathymetry
• Inertial scaling of dissipation in unsteady breaking waves
• Wave breaking onset and strength for two-dimensional deep-water wave groups
• On the breaking inception of unsteady water wave packets evolving in the presence of constant vorticity
• An energetic signature for breaking inception in surface gravity waves
• Wave statistics and energy dissipation of shallow-water breaking waves in a tank with a level bottom
• Numerical simulation of deep-water wave breaking using RANS: comparison with experiments
• Fold catastrophe in breaking waves
• Drifting breathers and Fermi-Pasta-Ulam paradox for water waves

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