The Ocean Engineering Laboratory, a two-story 30 m x 38 m facility, is dedicated to laboratory experiments in coastal and ocean processes. This laboratory, which is one of the largest laboratories for coastal processes in the United States, currently has high bay experimental space and eleven offices, used for faculty and graduate students in the Ocean Engineering Program. It was dedicated in 1981.

The major experimental facilities are located in the Ocean Engineering Laboratory and P.S. Du Pont Hall. The laboratory contains the following:

• Directional Wave Basin (20 m x 20 m x 1.1 m deep) for the study of realistic wave environments on coastal processes. For example, rip currents, flowing through channels in sand bars, have been studied in the basin, under ONR support. This facility has 34 individually programmable flap wave paddles along one wall of the basin, which combine to create a directional sea state.
• Precision Wave Tank (33 m long with a 0.6 m (w) x 0.76 m (d) cross section). Sixty percent of the tank has glass side walls which are aligned with an accuracy of plus/minus 0.5 mm to ensure that no tank irregularities affect the experiments. The tank has a (1m stroke) hydraulically actuated piston wavemaker designed to create the largest non-breaking wave conditions in the tank. The programmable wavemaker is already capable of creating sinusoidal, cnoidal and solitary waves, as well as a random sea state. A moveable instrument carriage mounted on stainless steel Thomson rails facilitates measuring waves along the length of the tank. An impermeable adjustable slope is installed at the far end of the tank. The tank also has recirculating capability--a current of 30 cm/sec can be generated in 50 cm of water.
• The Sand Beach Wave Tank -- a large towing tank/wave tank, with a cross-section of 2m x 1.5m, which is equipped with PCs for wave maker control and data acquisition and three automatically calibrating wave gages. The wavemaker is a hydraulically actuated piston wavemaker.
• Recirculating Armstrong flume that is 0.4 m wide and 0.6 m deep to generate hydraulic jumps.

The laboratory has a fiber-optic link to the university's ATM backbone. The university currently provides T1 access to the internet as well as considerable centralized computing facilities.

Other equipment: The lab maintains equipment to facilitiate experimental work including: automatically calibrating capacitance wave gages, single point fiber optic backscatter sensors, acoustic and electromagnetic current meters and resistance run-up wires, video cameras to collect basin and flume imagery, and a 4.9 meter portable wave flume for educational outreach.

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