Experiments on strong interactions between solitary waves

Abstract

Experiments on the interaction between solitary shallow-water waves propagating in the same direction have been performed in a rectangular channel. Two methods were devised to compensate for the dissipation of the waves in order to compare results with Hirota's (1971) solution for the collision of solitons described by the Korteweg-de Vries equation. Both qualitative and quantitative agreement with theory is obtained using the proposed corrections for wave damping.