Evolution of a quasi-steady breaking wave

Abstract

The stages of evolution of a quast-steady breaker from the onest of a capillary pattern to a fully evolved breaking wave are cgaracterized using high-image-density particle image velocimetry, which provides instrantaneous representations of the free surface and the patterns of vorticity beneath it. The initial stage, which sets in at a low value of Froude number, involves a capillary pattern along each trough-crest surface of a quasi-stationary wave. The successive crests of the capillary pattern exhihit increasing scale and culminate in a single largest-scale crest of the free surface. Immediately upstream of the large-scale crest, the capillary pattern shows counterclockwise concentrations of vorticity at its troughs and regions of clockwise vorticity beneath its crests. The onset of the final, largest-scale crest exhihits two forms: one involving no flow sparation; and the other exhibiting a small-scale separaed mixing layer. At an intermediate value of Froude number, a breaker occurs and the acpillary pattern is replaced by large-scale distortions of the free surface. The onset of separation, which involves flow deceleration along a region of the free surface having a large radius of curvature, leads to formation of a long mixing layeer, which has substantial levels of vorticity. Downstream of this breaker, the long-wavelength wave pattern is suppressed. At the largest value of Froude number, the onset of flow sparation rapidly occurs in conjunction with an abrupt change in slope of the surface, giving rise to vorticity concentrationa in the mixing layer.