Seiche waves

The wave in the clip at right reflects between the walls of the tank. The water sloshes back and forth. With no friction, in the ideal world of a flash movie, this goes on forever.

This wall-to-wall bouncing is called "seiching". It occurs for both surface waves and internal waves.  For a given wave speed, and a given distance between the walls, there is a particular period of these seiche waves called the "resonant period" of the system.

The period is given by ...

T = 2L/v

... where L is the distance from wall to wall, and v is the speed of the waves, whether they be surface waves or internal waves.

Suggestions for further work

1 Use the effect to measure the velocity of deep-water surface gravity waves as a function of wavelength.

2 Use the effect to measure the velocity of deep-water internal gravity waves as a function of wavelength.


A seiche calculator is/was at ...

http://www.coastal.udel.edu/faculty/rad/seiche.html


Close these frames when finished