Secondary current properties generated by wind-induced water waves in experimental conditions

Abstract

Secondary currents such as the Langmuir circulation are of high interest in natural rivers and the ocean because they have striking impacts on scour, sedimentation, and mass transport. Basic characteristics have been well-studied in straight open-channel flows. However, little is known regarding secondary circulation induced by wind waves. The presented study describes the generation properties of wind waves observed in the laboratory tank. Wind-induced water waves are known to produce large scale circulations. The phenomenon is observed together with high-speed and low-speed streaks, convergence and divergence zones, respectively. Therefore, it is important to determine the hydrodynamic properties of secondary currents for wind-induced water waves within rivers and lakes. In this study, using two high-speed CMOS cameras, stereoscopic particle image velocimetry (PIV) measurements were conducted in order to reveal the distribution of all three components of velocity vectors. The experiments allowed us to investigate the three-dimensional turbulent structure under water waves and the generation mechanism of large-scale circulations. Additionally, a third CMOS camera was used to measure the spanwise profile of thefree-surface elevation. The time-series of velocity components and the free-surface were obtained simultaneously. From our experiments, free-surface variations were found to influence the instantaneous velocity distributions of the cross-sectional plane. We also considered thegeneration process by the phase analysis related to gravity waves and compared the contribution of the apparent stress.

Keywords:

• secondary currents
• Langmuir circulation
• three-dimensional flow pattern
• wind-induced water waves
• stereoscopic PIV

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Yu Akiya, Akihiro Toda and Takaya Komatsu for their great help in the experiments and data analysis.

Additional information

Funding

The present study was carried out under financial support from the Research Project Grant-In-Aid for Scientific Research of Japanese Government [grant number 25420521], Principal Investigator M. Sanjou. The authors gratefully acknowledge this support.