We perform laboratory experiments in a recirculating shear flow tank of non-uniform salt-stratified water to examine the excitation of internal gravity waves (IGW) in the wake of a tall, thin vertical barrier. The purpose of this study is to characterize and quantify the coupling between coherent structures shed in the wake and internal waves that radiate from the mixing region into the deep, stationary fluid. In agreement with numerical simulations, large-amplitude internal waves are generated when the mixing region is weakly stratified and the deep fluid is sufficiently strongly stratified. If the mixing region is unstratified, weak but continuous internal wave excitation occurs. In all cases, the tilt of the phase lines of propagating waves lies within a narrow range. Assuming the waves are spanwise uniform, their amplitude in space and time is measured non-intrusively using a recently developed ‘synthetic schlieren’ technique. Using wavelet transforms to measure consistently the width and duration of the observed wavepackets, the Reynolds stress is measured and, in particular, we estimate that when large-amplitude internal wave excitation occurs, approximately 7% of the average momentum across the shear depth and over the extent of the wavepacket is lost due to transport away from the mixing region by the waves.

We propose that internal waves may act back upon the mean flow modifying it so that the excitation of waves of that frequency is enhanced. A narrow frequency spectrum of large-amplitude waves is observed because the feedback is largest for waves with phase tilt in a range near 45°. Numerical simulations and analytic theories are presented to further quantify this theory.