LARGE SCALE EXPERIMENTS ON EVOLUTION AND RUN-UP OF BREAKING SOLITARY WAVES

Abstract

The evolution and run-up of breaking solitary waves on plane beaches are investigated in this paper. A series of large-scale experiments were conducted in the SUPER TANK of Tainan Hydraulics Laboratory with three plane beaches of slope 0.05, 0.025 and 0.017 (1:20, 1:40 and 1:60). Solitary waves of which relative wave heights, H/h0, ranged from 0.03 to 0.31 were generated by two types of wave-board displacement trajectory: the ramp-trajectory and the solitary-wave trajectory proposed by Goring (1979). Experimental results show that under the same relative wave height, the waveforms produced by the two generation procedures becomes noticeably different as the waves propagate prior to the breaking point. Meanwhile, under the same relative wave height, the larger the constant water depth is, the larger the dimensionless run-up heights would be. Scale effects associated with the breaking process are discussed.