Laboratory study on the modulation evolution of nonlinear wave trains

New experiments focusing on the evolution characteristics of nonlinear wave trains were conducted in a large wave flume. A series of wave trains with added sidebands, varying initial steepness, perturbed amplitudes and frequencies, were physically generated in a long wave flume. The experimental results show that the increasing wave steepness, increases the speed of sidebands growth. To study the frequency and phase modulation, the Morlet wavelet transform is adopted to extract the instantaneous frequency of wave trains and the phase functions of each wave component. From the instantaneous frequency, there are local frequency downshifts, even an effective frequency downshift was not observed. The frequency modulation increases with an increase in amplitude modulation, and abrupt changes of instantaneous frequencies occur at the peak modulation. The wrapped phase functions show that in the early stage of the modulation, the phase of the upper sideband first diverges from that of the carrier waves. However, at the later stage, the discrepancy phase from the carrier wave transformed to the lower sideband. The phase deviations appear in the front of the envelope's peaks. Furthermore, the evolution of the instantaneous frequency exhibits an approximate recurrence-type for the experiment with large imposed sidebands, even when the corresponding recurrence is not observed in the Fourier spectrum.