Doctor doctor! I see waves before my eyes!

Q: If I can see waves being radiated, that's good ... right?

Fig 1: Duck radiating a wave

We've established that wave energy converters need a radiated wave to cancel out the wave being absorbed.

Question is, if you are watching a device operating in a wave tank or a sea trial, and you can see a wave being radiated, does this prove that the device is doing a good job of power capture?

A quick recap of linear mass-spring-damper models

In the spirit of not frightening away readers with equations, I shall refer to the Wikipedia (1) (2) and wave in the general direction of Wolfram (1) (2) (3). A user-guide follows:

• If we know how a linear system moves in response to an excitation by a single frequency (a sinusoid) we can use superposition to find the response to an excitation composed of many frequencies; so let's make things simple and consider single frequency excitation.
• The response to such an excitation is the sum of a transient which dies away, and an underlying steady state response: a sinusoid with the same frequency as the excitation, but a different amplitude and phase.
• Both the amplitude and phase of the steady-state response depend on the forcing frequency. They can be plotted against excitation frequency (Fig 1).

Fig 1: Universal resonance curve

Does Falnes's wave maker diagram apply to all WECs ?

Fig 1: Falnes's wave absorber = wave maker diagram

Falnes's assertion that 'a good wave absorber must be a good wavemaker', and his diagram depicting the amplitude and phase conditions for optimum absorption have been around since the early days of wave energy theory. I'd always thought that the wave absorber = wave maker diagram (Fig 1) was general, and applied to all wave energy converters. Would you be surprised if I told you that it applied to point absorbers only? (by point absorber I mean a body that is at least an order of magnitude smaller than the wavelength of the incident waves)

Botticelli's Venus: nice goddess, pity about the waves.

You know you've reached the room that houses Botticelli’s Venus by the crowds of people obscuring the view of the painting. It is certainly stunning from up close though.

Like a beauty spot, this painting is all the more beautiful for it's flaws. Consider the half-shell.

Wrong turns on the way through the 96% capture maze

The photo below (Fig 1) was used to show that 96% of the energy in the wave coming from the right had been absorbed by the duck. In a previous post I showed how we can draw this conclusion from the photo alone. Like navigating through a maze, my first attempts at solving this problem took me up several dead ends. It is worth discussing these, as I'm sure I'm not the only one to have made these mistakes?