《Laboratory Study of the Nonlinear Transformation of Irregular Waves over A Mild Slope》.pdfVIP

China Ocean Eng., Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 489 – 500 © 2014 Chinese Ocean Engineering Society DOI 10.1007/s13344-014-0040-5, ISSN 0890-5487 Laboratory Study of the Nonlinear Transformation of Irregular Waves * over A Mild Slope 1 YU Bo (于 博), MA Yu-xiang (马玉祥) , MA Xiao-zhou (马小舟) and DONG Guo-hai (董国海) 1 State Key Laboratory of Coastal and Offshore Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116023, China (Received 26 September 2011; received revised form 13 March 2013; accepted 31 May 2013) ABSTRACT This paper considers the nonlinear transformation of irregular waves propagating over a mild slope (1꞉40). Two cases of irregular waves, which are mechanically generated based on JONSWAP spectra, are used for this purpose. The results indicate that the wave heights obey the Rayleigh distribution at the offshore location; however, in the shoaling region, the heights of the largest waves are underestimated by the theoretical distributions. In the surf zone, the wave heights can be approximated by the composite Weibull distribution. In addition, the nonlinear phase coupling within the irregular waves is investigated by the wavelet-based bicoherence. The bicoherence spectra reflect that the number of frequency modes participating in the phase coupling increases with the decreasing water depth, as does the degree of phase coupling. After the incipient breaking, even though the degree of phase coupling decreases, a great number of higher harmonic wave modes are also involved in nonlinear interactions. Moreover, the summed bicoherenc