Experiments on Arrested Saline Wedge

Experimental results are presented which show that the onset of interfacial wave breaking can be expressed by a stability parameter which is a function of the interfacial densimetric Froude number and the interfacial Reynolds number. This parameter is shown to be independent of the flow Reynolds number upstream of a salt wedge and can be scaled to give a stability parameter for prototype flows. Measurements of the rate of mixing at the interface proved that mixing theory based on momentum exchange of turbulent flows is valid as a working hypothesis, and that this mixing is inversely proportional to the relative density.