On the Mechanism of Laminar Damping of Oscillatory Waves Due to Bottom Friction

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discover the mechanism of the laminar damping of oscillatory waves due to bottom friction with the aid of both the theory of the laminar boundary layer caused by waves and the measurements of the shearing stress and wave amplitude attenuation. In a theoretical approach the effects of convective terms involved in the basic equations of laminar boundary layers developing both on the bottom and the side walls of a wave channel, are considered on the basis of an approximate solution of the equation, and a theory of the laminar damping of Airy waves is established. In experimental studies, furthermore, direct measurements of instantaneous shearing stresses and observations of wave amplitude attenuation were performed, and the experimental results are compared with both the above theory and the linearized one.