Tag Archives: hydraulic jump

Standing waves

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Standing waves caused by rocks in a current.

I am incredibly fascinated by standing waves.

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Standing waves.

The standing waves are caused by rocks sitting in a current. From the pictures below it is not really clear where those rocks are situated, whether they are upstream of all this wave action or in the focal point of the wave fronts.

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More standing waves.

Having stood there with my mom for quite some time the other weekend, just watching the water, I can tell you that it’s the upstream obstacle. You can see for yourself here:

What you also see in that video is that not all of the waves are, in fact, standing waves. The lower-amplitude waves to the left on both the image above and below are not – they are radiating away from some obstacle.

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More standing waves.

Just from looking at that image it is clear that the bathymetry is very irregular and that the current speed is quite inhomogeneous, too. So maybe it is not surprising that the condition for a standing wave – that the current speed and the wave speed are the same, but going in opposite directions – is not met everywhere. Particularly, in many cases it is hypercritical and the waves are just flushed away. Note the current speed in the video below.

And all of this action is happening on an exciting river called … wait for it … Pinnau. In Mölln. And this is what it looks like to most people: Tiny little rapids somewhere in a forest.

 

Pinnau

P.S.: I just realized that when I’ve talked about standing waves before on this blog, I’ve always talked about the see-sawing kind. When obviously this kind is so much cooler!

Wind waves meet current

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Wind waves on one side of the current – no waves on the other.

Recently in Bergen, I was walking to meet up with a friend at the kayak club, and I had to cross a bridge that has always fascinated me. Underneath the bridge, there is only a very narrow opening connecting basically the ocean on one side and a small bay on the other side. On this part of the Norwegian coast, the tidal range is easily of the order of a meter, so this narrow opening under the bridge makes for some pretty strong currents. In fact, when paddling through that opening, when the tide is right you can really see how the surface elevation changes from one side of the bridge to the other.

So when I was walking there recently, this is what I saw:

Strong current from the lower left to the upper right of the picture, wind blowing from the right, hence waves on the right side of the current and no waves on the left side.

This might be difficult to see on this picture, but there is a strong current going from the lower left corner of the picture towards the upper right. And on the right side of that current there are a lot of wind waves. But on the left side there are hardly any, even though there is nothing blocking the wind, just the current blocking the propagation of waves. Wind is coming from the right here.

I found it really fascinating how this current acted as a barrier to the waves and stood a couple of minutes watching. A couple of people stopped and looked, too, but didn’t find anything interesting to see and were slightly puzzled. But what I see is fetch (or that there isn’t enough of it on the left side of the current) and hydraulic jumps (or that the current is clearly going faster than the waves are). Which means that I start wondering how fast that current would have to be in order to stop waves from propagating across. Which then means I start estimating the wave lengths in oder to estimate the waves’ velocities to answer the previous question. So that’s reason enough to stand there for quite some time, just watching, right?

Hydraulic jump II

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More movies of my kitchen sink.

I am really fascinated by the hydraulic jumps in my kitchen sink. I can’t believe I haven’t used this before when I was teaching! Yes, movies of rivers and rapids are always really impressive, too, but how cool is it to be able to observe hydraulic jumps in your own sink? Let me remind you:

Hydraulic jump in my kitchen sink. Video here

So this is what happens when the water jet hits the (more or less) level bottom of the sink. But what would happen if it instead hit a slope?

Now, if I wasn’t working a full-time job, or if that job wasn’t completely unrelated to anything to do with hydraulic jumps, I would now proudly present movies of all kinds of hydraulic jumps on sloped surfaces. As it is, I can tell you that I have tons of ideas of where to go to make really nice movies, but for now this is all I can offer:

Yes, that is a chopping board in a sink. It shows really nicely how the hydraulic jump occurs closer to the point of impact of the jet as you go uphill (because the water slows down faster going in that direction than going downhill) and again how the radius depends on the flow speed of the jet. Stay tuned for a more elaborate post on this!

Hydraulic jumps

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Water changing its velocity from above to below the critical velocity.

Recently in beautiful Wetzlar: The river Lahn flows through the city below the medieval cathedral at sunset. And I’m showing you this because we can observe a hydraulic jump!

A hydraulic jump occurs when water that was flowing faster than the critical speed suddenly slows down to below the critical speed. Some of its kinetic energy is converted to potential energy (see the higher surface levels of the turbulent part of the fluid {except in this example the water is flowing down a steep slope, so the higher levels are a bit tricky to observe}) and a lot of energy is lost to turbulence. A very nice example can be seen here:

As the water moves away from where the jet hits the sink, it slows down. Can you spot the hydraulic jump? Isn’t it cool to watch how it is pushed away if the flow rate is higher, and how it comes back again when the tap is slowly closed?

P.S.: Yes, I’m being very vague about what that critical speed might be. Stay tuned for a post on that, I’m working on it! Just had to share the Lahn movie :-)