Non-intrusive measurements of wave nonlinearity over movable bed of sediment with different beach slopes

Abstract

A series of laboratory experiments were undertaken to qualitatively investigate the evolution of wave nonlinearity over a movable bed of sediment with five different beach slopes under regular waves in a medium-scale wave flume. An innovative non-intrusive data collecting system, which mainly consists of three side-looking high-speed cameras, was developed to collect high-resolution and synchronous data on free-surface water elevation of waves and bed level changes without causing any disturbances to wave motions and the movable bed of sediment. On analyzing the collected experimental data, it is found that regular waves become nonlinear when they propagate to the shoaling zone and start breaking, and linear wave theory is quite accurate for calculating wave parameters such as orbital velocity with the correlation coefficient r2 = 0.8–0.95 before the waves break, but becomes less accurate after the waves break or are in the breaking zone with the smaller correlation coefficient r2 = 0.4–0.6. Four parameters, wave skewness Skη, asymmetry Ayη, Ursell number Ur, and Rocha number NP0, are introduced to describe the wave nonlinearity, of which Skη and Ayη are found to be of largest amplitudes at the wave breaking point and then start to decrease in the breaking zone and are almost unchanged for different beach slopes, while Ur further increases in the breaking zone and exceed the first larger value as waves approach to shoreline, but NP0 is almost linearly proportional to wave orbital velocity amplitude and quite sensitive to beach slope. The location of sandbar is found close to the wave breaking point in the wave flume and may be also considered as the point where wave nonlinearity becomes important for sediment transport in the surf zone, and the linear wave theory becomes less accurate.