The Wave Equation after TAMWAVE: Alternatives and Substitutes

The discontinuation of the TAMWAVE wave equation program has left something of a void in our offerings. This post explores the alternatives that we have on hand, primarily for educational purposes. (All offerings of this site are subject to the Terms and Conditions of This Site.)

The Problems

When the first geotechnical site of this family of sites (vulcanhammer.net) was started, one of the objectives was to provide free downloads of both engineering documents and software for the profession. This is based on the assumption that the benefit–both educational and in use–of this material should be spread to those on a nonexistent or limited budget. This has worked out well with the document offerings, thanks to the ubiquitous pdf format and the abundance of material without copyright issues. With the software, things are more complicated, which is why our offerings of these have decreased.

There are basically two issues that have complicated use of geotechnical software in general and wave equation software in particular for educational purposes from the start:

• Platform Issues; and
• Paywall Issues.

The first is part of the progress of computing: the changes in operating systems and platforms make it difficult to run older software, even if the features of that software are adequate for a particular person’s use. The second has been the withdrawal of later versions of software behind paywalls of one kind or another. This is exasperating for a technology which is as old as the wave equation for piles.

TAMWAVE was designed to address these issues but fell afoul of the platform issue. PHP–the language TAMWAVE was written in–isn’t ideal for this kind of application, and the security issues that plague just about every web site have forced hosting services and PHP’s developers to “harden” the language against attacks. This is what occasioned the withdrawal of TAMWAVE, although this withdrawal has been in the works for some time for this and other reasons.

The Solutions

WEAP87

Although it is now nearly forty years old, in some ways WEAP87 is the best solution for educational purposes. It covers a wide variety of hammers (including air/steam, hydraulic and diesel) and has no restrictions on its distribution or use. Complete documentation and background for the software–along with the download–can be found at the page WEAP: Wave Equation Analysis of Pile Driving, with SPILE, Estimation of Pile Ultimate Capacity. The drawback of the software is that it is a DOS program, and that brings two disadvantages:

• It will not run in Windows after XP. However, it can be run in the DOSBox program, which means that it is platform independent (available for Windows 10/11, Mac, Linux, etc.) Information on this is in the post Partying Like It’s 1987: Running WEAP87 and SPILE (and other programs) on DOSBox. It outputs to text files, which eliminates the DOS printing issue and makes it easy to present them in word processing documents.
• Contemporary students, used to the “point and click” interfaces of contemporary software, will find WEAP87’s text interface difficult to master. (In its defence, the interactive input was way ahead of most DOS engineering programs of the era.)

TNOWAVE Based Programs

In the early 2000’s Profound (the company which markets and maintains the TNOWAVE software) developed hammer manufacturer specific versions of the software. In each case only hammers which the specific manufacturer produced were represented in the software. Here we present two versions of the software:

• IHCWAVE, the earlier of the two, featuring the IHC hammers. The origin of these is discussed in the post Vulcan, Underwater and Hydraulic Hammers. It was developed around 2000/2001. It uses a 16-bit installer, which means that it will not install beyond Windows XP. This can be fixed but then the newer versions of Windows do not support the old Windows Help version.
• APEWAVE, developed by the Seattle-based manufacturer of diesel and vibratory drivers. It is newer (2005) and thus will install on later versions of Windows but the same issue of the Windows Help file with IHCWAVE also apply to this version.

Both of these are shareware and, assuming you can install them, you need to take a look at their terms and conditions in addition to ours. Probably the best way to run either one of these is a Windows XP virtual machine (assuming you don’t have an actual XP computer in operation!) More information about TNOWAVE can be found at the post TNOWAVE and the Method of Characteristics.

TTI

TTI, like WEAP87, is a DOS program. We discuss this in the post TTI Wave Equation Program, with MICROWAVE Program. It is less user friendly than WEAP87 and does not really support the diesel hammers.