Flow-destabilized seiches in a reservoir with a movable dam

Using a combination of theoretical modelling and experiments, seiches in a reservoir are shown to become linearly unstable due to the coupling with flow under a dam that opens and closes in response to the upstream water pressure. The phenomenon is related to the mechanism commonly attributed to generate sound in musical instruments like the clarinet. Shallow water theory is used to model waves in the reservoir, and these are coupled, by an outflow condition, to a nonlinear oscillator equation for the dam opening. In general, several modes of oscillation are predicted to be unstable, and the frequency of the most unstable mode compares well with the dominant frequencies observed in the experiments. The experiments also show a systematic variation of the amplitude and spatial structure of the oscillations with the weight of the dam, reflecting the nonlinear coupling between the unstable modes of the system. © 2011 Cambridge University Press.