Wave Tank - Building and first rough testing.

Although i have zero experience in this field, it seemed appropriate to work out the details on how to build a small wave tank, and do some video of the boat performing in the waves. Amazingly, immediately a couple design flaws showed up! and the test apparatus is not even complete. However here is the start to the whole idea....

First design a 2x4 and plywood structure capable of bearing the weight of the water... The tank is 16' long, 3' wide, and 24" deep.

Once the tank was built, I lined the inside with white EPS foam, and ran a thick plastic liner through the tank. Filled the tank with water and Dyed the water green so it contrasts with the boat. I Built a wave generating box, and an energy absorbing stop at the end of the tank. I had an old CNC controller here. So I spent a day rigging the Z-Axis of the CNC machine to be programmable and move up and down to create waves. Turns out the amount of water you need to displace is too much weight for the motor to push. So we are still creating waves manually.

Still to do, is create a rig that will hold the boat steady, and still figure a way to generate waves in a predictable manner. We'll get to all that, but for now... lets get the boat in the water and slosh some waves over it!

Images of the scale model in the tank

Here is a short video of the first waves... Not at all scientific, but a good proportional idea of how the waves will impact the boat. The Video has been slowed down to 1/8th the speed, so the video represents "real life" on the 1/8th scale model. The video can be viewed in better quality here...
Wave tank trial - Click here

And here is a short clip of some small waves being generated by the CNC controller. A better quality can be watched here
Waves Tank, small waves - Click here

Bigger, better and hopefully more scientific updates to follow!