The Netherlands has just unveiled a wave generator machine that can produce the world's largest human made wave. It was built at a facility in Deltares to test the structural integrity of dams and other barriers designed to stop waves whipped by the sea and violent storms.
Called the Delta Flume, the machine is around 1,000 ft long, 16 ft wide and has a depth of 30 ft, according to Popular Science. It is filled with 9 million liters of water, which is then pushed by a wall - a massive metal plate 32 feet high - to make huge waves. These waves then batter coastal structures such as dikes, sand dunes and even a pylon of an offshore wind turbine, constructed at the end of the contraption until they are destroyed.
The Delta Flume is part of Netherlands' coastal defense strategy. It is important because much of the country is below sea level, noted Slashgear. The Dutch have been particularly obsessed with their defenses since 1953, when 1,800 people perished in a major flood.
The Delta Flume, which was inaugurated last Monday, is built on such gigantic scale because smaller models are simply not good enough to serve their purpose in hydraulic engineering, according to Science.
Watch how the machine works in the videos below.
The Dutch wave-making facility, however, is not the first of its kind in the world. There is, for example, the case of the flume at Japan's Port and Airport Research Institute, which is designed to simulate tsunamis. This machine, however, is constructed to produce a single wall of water rather than a consistent barrage of huge, violent waves.
