Why Do Boats Make This Shape?

Why Do Boats Make This Shape?

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This video is about the “Kelvin wake” shape of water wakes behind boats – we talk about mach angle, dispersion, superposition of many waves, and how these all lead to the pattern of a wake. We don’t get into Froude number though…

REFERENCES
Boat Wake Wikipedia Page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake​

Interactive Boat Wake Simulation: https://observablehq.com/@rreusser/di…​

Feynman Lectures on Water Waves: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.e…​

Building up a Boat Wake from V-Shaped Wakes: https://editor.p5js.org/aatish/full/b…​

Wave Dispersion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispers…​

Mach angle shock waves:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/…​

Ship Wakes – Kelvin or Mach Angle? Rabaud and Moisy Paper: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract…​

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Created by Henry Reich