A Numerical Investigation of Wedge Angle Effects on a Plunger Type Wave Maker With a Constant Submerged Volume

The effect of wedge angle at a constant submerged volume for a plunger type wave maker on the wave height, wave amplitude ratio and the quality of generated wave is studied numerically for a range of linear wave conditions in this research. The commercial ANSYS-FLUENT finite volume code is used to solve the Navier-Stokes equations using dynamic meshes and a Volume of Fluid (VOF) scheme is used to capture the air-water interface.

A second order upwind numerical scheme is used to discretize the convective terms of the momentum equations and the standard SIMPLE algorithm is used for coupling the pressure and velocity based equations. At first the plunger-type wedge shaped wave-maker of Wang is considered numerically for the conditions used in his experiments, over a range of linear wave conditions (H/λ less than or equal to 0.03).

After validating the numerical method, the effect of plunger wedge angle on the quality of the generated waves and on the power which is needed to run the wave maker are investigated. From these results, we conclude that the quality of the generated waves reduces with increasing wedge angle, when the submerged volume is fixed.