A Study of Multiple Wave Probe Methods to Resolve Wave Reflections

Wave reflections are an important phenomenon for analyzing structures close to the coast. Wave energy structures increase the complexities of these measurements due to wave absorption. There have been numerous techniques developed to quantify wave reflections. Multiple wave probes have been used to resolve the incident and reflected wave components in the wave field. This paper attempts to validate the theory proposed by Lin and Huang (2004) that higher harmonic waves can be resolved using four wave gauges instead of traditional practice of three wave gauges which is unable to resolve higher wave harmonics. The results of this paper test the new technique by estimating the error bands for digitizing frequencies, noisy signals, and different wavelengths for a specific set of wave gauge spacing. The waves tested are artificially generated signals with known incident and reflected amplitudes with free and bound harmonic waves. This allows error estimations based on true values. After validation, we tested the technique with waves in a numerical wave tank (NWT). This comprehensive study of the multi-probe method proves the validity and provides limitations of using this technique for other ocean applications.