Deriving Group Velocity for Gravity Waves

deejaybee11
Messages
2
Reaction score
0

Homework Statement


In a lab experiment about Gravity Waves and Dispersion, one of the preliminary questions is:

Show that for gravity waves the group velocity is:

C_{g} = \frac{C_{p}}{2}\sqrt{1 + \frac{2kh}{sinh(2kh)}}

Homework Equations



C_{g} = dω/dk

ω = \sqrt{gktanh(kh)}

where ω is the angular frequency, and
C_{p} = \sqrt{\frac{gtanh(hk)}{k}}

The Attempt at a Solution


By using the product rule and the chain rule I get

d/dk(gktanh(kh))^{1/2} = \frac{1}{2}(gktanh(kh))^{-1/2}(gtanh(kh) + gk/cosh^{2}(kh))

But I have no idea where to go from here.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Physics news on Phys.org
Not sure if it was a mistype, but the term with cosh^2 should have an h in the denominator.

Now try to see if there is anything you can take out of the brackets to make C_p in front of them.
 
Yeah that was supposed to have an h in the denominator sorry. I have tried numerous ways of factoring something out but i can't seem to get it to work
 
To solve this, I first used the units to work out that a= m* a/m, i.e. t=z/λ. This would allow you to determine the time duration within an interval section by section and then add this to the previous ones to obtain the age of the respective layer. However, this would require a constant thickness per year for each interval. However, since this is most likely not the case, my next consideration was that the age must be the integral of a 1/λ(z) function, which I cannot model.
Back
Top