The effect of air leakage and heat exchange on the decay of entrapped air pocket slamming oscillations

The phenomenon studied in this work is that of an air pocket entrapped by a free surface water wave inside a rectangular tank at a high filling level. The wave, which is a gravity wave, is caused by forced horizontal motion which is constructed in a particular way, in order to entrap an air pocket as it approaches the upper left corner of the tank. As the wave touches the roof, the air is compressed and starts to oscillate. The oscillations resemble, to some extent, the free oscillations of an underdamped mass-spring system, where the mass is related to the generalized added mass effect of the water pressure associated with the air pocket oscillations. The stiffness is due to the compressibility of the air. The reason for the damping or, more generally, the decay of the air pocket oscillations is less understood. Air leakage has been proposed as one possible reason for this decay. In this work, the role of air leakage is found not to be the reason for the decay of the air pocket oscillations, because it is not present during major parts of the impact. However, by drilling holes in the roof of the tank, the effect of leakage during the oscillations is proven to cause decay. To explain the physical source of the decay of the oscillations, damping due to heat transfer to and from the air pocket is investigated through an analytical one-dimensional steady-state model. The damping due to heat transfer is observed to play an important role. The obtained understanding of the mechanisms causing the decay of the air-pocket impact at the upper corner is believed to be relevant to other types of impacts, particularly the entrapment of air pockets on walls by breaking waves. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3638612]