A comparison of time and spectral analyses on physical simulations of wave records in flumes

Abstract

The analysis of wave records originated by physical simulation experiments in wave flumes or tanks may be done considering suitable wave parameters, either using spectral or time analysis methods. The first type of analysis was made available in the SAM application, Capitão (2002), an integrated software package that has been in use at LNEC for some years now. However, a time analysis method was lacking in this software package. This paper describes the implementation of this time analysis method (direct method) into the existing SAM software, and the testing procedures to verify that it performs as intended. In order to test this type of analysis and to compare it with the spectral analysis, a number of numerical and physical tests were performed using SAM and a wave flume. A comparison between time-domain and frequency-domain methods was the main result obtained with this work. The comparisons made use of the parameters wave height, mean wave period and significant wave period, obtained with both methods