Located in the 14,225 SF Coastal Engineering Building of University of North Carolina Wilmington, the 2,400 SF Wave Flume Lab provides a hands-on learning center for students of UNCW’s new Coastal Engineering degree program. The 24-meter wave flume enables coastal and ocean engineering studies of real-world problems involving waves and the transport of sand, such as the naturally occurring beach erosion-recovery cycles on barrier islands. The Wave Lab will enable additional research in wave-structure interaction, experimentation with innovative coastal protection strategies, evaluation of wave energy converter devices, and the advancement of precision oceanographic instrumentation.
