The influence of directional spreading of waves is significant for wave-induced loads, wave breaking and nonlinearity of the waves. For physical model testing performed at test facilities such as the Ocean and Coastal Engineering Laboratory at Aalborg University, it is crucial to validate if the test conditions match the target sea states by measurement and analysis of the generated directional wave field. Most of the existing methods assume a double summation sea state to be present which is valid in the prototype. However, waves in the laboratory are usually generated by single summation. The current paper presents a method to analyze short-crested waves generated by the single summation method. Compared to similar methods oblique reflections are considered instead of only in-line reflections. The results show that the method successfully decomposes the incident and reflected wave fields in the time domain. Thus, for example the incident wave height distribution may be obtained. The sensitivity of the new method to additional reflective directions, noise, calibration errors and positional errors of the wave gauges was found small.
We present a high-order nodal spectral element method for the two-dimensional simulation of nonlinear water waves. The model is based on the mixed Eulerian–Lagrangian (MEL) method. Wave interaction with fixed truncated structures is handled using unstructured meshes consisting of high-order iso-parametric quadrilateral/triangular elements to represent the body surfaces as well as the free surface elevation. A numerical eigenvalue analysis highlights that using a thin top layer of quadrilateral elements circumvents the general instability problem associated with the use of asymmetric mesh topology.We demonstrate how to obtain a robust MEL scheme for highly nonlinear waves using an efficient combination of (i) global L2 projection without quadrature errors, (ii) mild modal filtering and (iii) a combination of local and global re-meshing techniques. Numerical experiments for strongly nonlinear waves are presented. The experiments demonstrate that the spectral element model provides excellent accuracy in prediction of nonlinear and dispersive wave propagation. The model is also shown to accurately capture the interaction between solitary waves and fixed submerged and surface-piercing bodies. The wave motion and the wave-induced loads compare well to experimental and computational results from the literature.