Question: What is used to operate a wave pool?

Ollie Otter answered on 4 Mar 2020:

Excellent question!

The biggest biggest wave pool in our lab is 35 m long, 12 m wide and 3 m deep, and it is filled with ordinary tap water.
On one end of the pool, along its entire width, there is an array of paddles. These paddles are hinged at the bottom and can be moved back and forth with electric motors to make the waves. The size of the waves depends on how far we move the paddles back and forth.
On the other end of the wave pool we have made an artificial beach, not with sand but with metal plates with lots of tiny holes in it. This beach brakes up the incoming waves to stop them from bouncing back off the wall, otherwise the pool would just turn into a very large bucket of sloshing water!

This is a nice video of a scale model of a floating wind turbine in our wave pool:

To watch it just copy the link and paste it into your web browser, if you’re not sure how to do that ask your teacher. The video starts off with a lot of waffle, just ignore that, but from 30 seconds in it will show how the paddles move to make waves and it also shows how the scale model moves in the waves.

Hope that makes sense but feel free to ask more questions!