• Ocean tank,

Rogue waves generated in the towing tank - article published in Physical Review Fluids

Rogue waves are very high ocean waves, compared to their immediate neighbours, which can form on both calm and rough seas. This sudden and unpredictable phenomenon may be rare, but it needs to be studied because of its danger to sea users. These rogue waves are the subject of joint collaboration between researchers from Centrale Nantes - via the LHEEA - the CNRS and the universities of Paris and Lille as part of the ANR DYSTURB project.

on July 11, 2022

New wave tank tests have demonstrated that by manipulating the wave spectrum in a non-linear way, rogue waves can be generated by controlling their position in the tank and their time of occurrence: these studies advance the understanding of rogue waves and their behaviour. 

The LHEEA was involved in two aspects of this project, deploying the complementary capabilities of its simulation and tank test facilities. 

On the simulation side, the teams used the free-to-access HOS-NWT software developed at the LHEEA. This software, based on the High-Order Spectral (HOS) method, is used to generate and propagate highly non-linear wave fields in tanks of random constant depth. As these simulations faithfully reproduce tank tests, complementary data is obtained by running the simulations with different sets of parameters from those used in the tests.

Tank testing took place in the 140m-long Centrale Nantes towing tank. Waves are generated by moving a perfectly controlled articulated flap, thus reproducing of sea states at a reduced scale, as observed at real size in the ocean. During these tests, random waves were generated for 5 consecutive hours in the tank. The combination of certain random waves led to extreme phenomena causing rogue waves.

These tests led to a new publication of an article in the journal Physical Review Fluids:

Prediction and manipulation of hydrodynamic rogue waves via nonlinear spectral engineering
Alexey Tikan, Felicien Bonnefoy, Giacomo Roberti, Gennady El, Alexander Tovbis, Guillaume Ducrozet, Annette Cazaubiel, Gaurav Prabhudesai, Guillaume Michel, Francois Copie, Eric Falcon, Stephane Randoux, and Pierre Suret
Physical Review Fluids 7, 054401 (2022)
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevFluids.7.054401
Published on July 18, 2022 Updated on October 19, 2023