Physics

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/dispersion-in-water-surface-waves

Feynman Lectures on Water Waves: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_51.html#Ch51-S4

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

Wave Dispersion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispersion_relation

Mach angle shock waves:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/mach-angle

Ship Wakes – Kelvin or Mach Angle? Rabaud and Moisy Paper: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.214503

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