ORE Seminar: Study of Traditional Seawalls

February 20, 1:00pm - 2:00pm
Mānoa Campus, POST 723

Hunting has been facilitated by strategies to circumvent animals’ evasive maneuvers, for example by camouflage, ambush, and the use of traps. In addition to inland fish weirs, coastal enclosures imitating shallow tropical lagoons were built by Pacific engineers throughout the centuries. Along with harbors, these ancient structures are the most successful, durable examples of coastal engineering. It is interesting to speculate that these engineers understood and harnessed the secondary undulations of tides on the coastline, transforming the pressure wave into a velocity loop to mix and refresh the water in the habitat for the benefit of aquatic life. The fundamental principle underlying such an engineering strategy is the advantageous creation of seiche, or liquid resonance. That phenomenon is based on the speed of water motion, and the geometry of the partially closed basin. In theory, the system works like an amplifier for undulations on the order of minutes, which are observed by humans as changes in the mean water level. Assuming this type of design was used, these might be the first resonators of this type ever described in the scientific literature. In this talk I will describe the experiments, results, and hypotheses from ongoing research on this topic. Speaker: Ned Samson; Ph.D. Candidate, Ocean and Resources Engineering


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Ocean and Resources Engineering, Mānoa Campus

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