What’s 80 feet long, five feet wide and holds enough water in its glass-and-steel tank to fill roughly 160 bathtubs? That’s 9,500 gallons, about half the volume of a one-car garage of water in case you were wondering. Oh yes, it also looks cool.
Answer: The new state-of-the-art wave flume at UNC Wilmington’s Coastal Engineering Program. It’s the only wave flume this size in the South and Mid-Atlantic regions.
“The wave flume is another tool in our back pocket to better understand our evolving coastline,” said program director Joe Long, Ph.D. “As the state’s coastal university, we take our classes to the beach for teaching and research, and now we can also step into our wave lab and conduct controlled lab and modeling experiments.”
Coastal engineering relies on a combination of coastal field measurements, numerical modeling and controlled lab experiments. The wave flume will allow for experiments and theories to be tested in the lab before going into the field.
The flume can be programmed to mimic nature with calm or more energetic waves, and the slope of the bottom can be adjusted to better understand how waves break under different conditions. Researchers can also add sand to study how waves affect the ocean floor by creating turbulence and currents that move sediment and by making sandbars.
“In nature, we can’t follow an individual wave or stop the waves to measure where the sand has moved. We can’t put a structure in place, run a wave condition, then change the structure and run the same wave condition to see if the performance changed,” Dr. Long explained. “With this equipment, students will be able to see complex concepts that we explain in the classroom up close and use the facility as part of research projects.”
A unique carriage that moves in two dimensions sits on top of the flume. This gives researchers a platform to mount a range of instruments and measure movement of the water or sand up, down and across the tank.
As North Carolina’s coast continues to be impacted by climate change, researchers hope the wave flume will help in the development and testing of natural and nature-based features (like seagrass marshes and living shorelines) and computer models exploring how coastlines will evolve.
