Designing, Programming and Feasibility study of a Paddle Wavemaker to increase quality and decrease production costs

Quality needs to be included in the core of the manufactured products; it should not be left to the after-production inspection. Hence this paper aims at changing the structure of the wavemakers which are mainly mechanical to electronically controlled devices from the beginning of the design process in order to lead to increased quality. Besides, to increase the accuracy of the produced waves, servomotor which is better controlled is used instead of stepper motors. Designing a marine structure requires marine laboratories and model testing. In such laboratories, a device called wavemaker is needed to create and model sea waves. In this project, first samples of existing water flume and wavemaker are analyzed. Then basic information about design and construction is extracted. Afterward, the initial outline for the wavemaker is proposed and detailed design is done. The initial goal is to build a scale-appropriate model for use in the laboratory that could generate regular waves with maximum amplitude. This requires a servomotor and ball screw system. Albeit such a scheme was considered so that it would be similar to the original system, which could later, produce irregular waves with the desired spectrum; otherwise, in the case of using other systems, which are much simpler and cheaper than the servo system, we would be able to produce regular waves. Some programs are written to create a regular wave and an appropriate set of controls for generating a regular and irregular wave are created to prepare the system for producing irregular waves, if necessary. Although due to the limitation of the dimensions we might not be able to generate such waves in the laboratory, it can be used in the integrated water flume to generate irregular waves. Given the range of the desired waves, the best system for producing irregular and regular a wave in flume is the paddle wavemaker for which the designs are provided.