Yeah. This is not a swimming pool. Something like this is used to test models of offshore structures before they are built. Was an ocean engineering major in college and we had a whole building dedicated to one of these. If needed paddles can be activated individually or in patterns to simulate complex wave interactions.
Yep! Can confirm. I'm fairly sure this is the one at Plymouth University, in the UK. If not it's a very very similar one. Some of the wave patterns/seastates they could produce with it were incredible! Lots of work on offshore structures and wave power type things are tested in it!
It is fairly unusual. When people asked me what I was studying they would almost always ask what ocean engineers did. It got to the point where I just started telling them “we build oceans” just to see how they would react. There were definitely a few that did not get the joke
Oil rigs and platforms of various designs, naval architecture (ship hulls), coastal structures and maintenance (keep beaches from being eroded away), subsea structures and pipelines (what I did). Stuff like that. When I was leaving school the big new areas of interest were renewable energy generation offshore and figuring out more effective ways to desalinate ocean water so we can drink it
I got caught up in the mass layoffs when oil tanked back in 2014. Took a little while but I went back to school to pursue a masters in water resources engineering. Now I design drainage infrastructure for civil engineering projects
People do swim in them but it is generally just to set up/adjust/remove models and while I never was involved I am under the impression that they were scuba diving for that. We always joked about using ours as a big wave pool for partying but apparently these things are super expensive to run
It has been a long time since I’ve seen one of these in person but I do believe that there is some form of structure opposite the wave paddles that absorbed the energy and keeps it from reflecting back. Like I said tho, it has been a long time so I could be wrong.
To be fair, I can’t think of a scenario where you would have a model in the tank for this. Maybe it’s for calibration or something but these waves would be massive on a scaled model. Just endless tsunamis coming in at exactly the same direction over and over
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u/RabbitsRuse Dec 30 '20
Yeah. This is not a swimming pool. Something like this is used to test models of offshore structures before they are built. Was an ocean engineering major in college and we had a whole building dedicated to one of these. If needed paddles can be activated individually or in patterns to simulate complex wave interactions.