On the nonlinear transformation of breaking and non-breaking waves induced by a weakly submerged shelf

The interaction of regular quasi-monochromatic waves with a weakly submerged rectangular shelf is studied by means of CFD simulations. The fundamental incident wave frequency is kept constant for the full set of simulated cases, while the incident wave amplitude is made increase progressively, so that the interaction with the shelf is dominated by almost inviscid non-linear flow for the smallest and by breaking for the highest incident waves. A parameter identification (PI) procedure is used to adapt a reduced model to the highly resolved time-space matrix of wave elevations obtained from the numerical simulations, on the weather and lee side respectively. In particular the wave number and the frequency of the component waves in the reduced model are left uncoupled, thus computed by the PI independently. The comparison of simulated data with experiments generally shows a very good agreement. Free/locked, incident/reflected, first/higher order wave components are quantified accurately by the PI and the energy transfer to super-harmonics is clearly evidenced. Moreover the results of the PI show clearly a very large increase in the phase speed of the higher order free waves on the lee side of the shelf, with increasing deviation from the linear behavior with increasing incident wave amplitude.