EEC-9711733 Jose Roesset This award provides funding to the Engineering Research Center at Texas A&M University/University of Texas at Austin entitled "Offshore Technology Research Center" to develop a multimedia electronic textbook on Ocean Wave Theory and Applications. This courseware can be used as a complement to undergraduate, graduate, and continuing education courses in ocean, coastal, civil, environmental, and marine engineering or as a stand alone book. This educational material will be developed in both CD-ROM and World Wide Web format. The goal of this textbook is to provide students with an understanding of the basics of ocean wave theory and current experimental and computational techniques for assessing and predicting the effect of the ocean on its surroundings. This textbook will include topics on wave kinematics, wave dispersion and refraction, linear and nonlinear free surface dynamics, wave forces on bodies of arbitrary shape, diffraction and radiation by fixed or moving bodies, ocean wave statistics and their simulation as stochastic processes, and experimental demonstrations from the Center's wave basin research. Students will be able to solve an unlimited number of ocean wave problems with different parameters to observe the relative importance of different physical variables, validity of various approximations, and the behavior of solutions.
