A solution to the Helmholtz equation was first found by Sommerfeld in 1896 who applied it to the diffraction of light (details may be found in Dean and Dalrymple (1991)). Somewhat later, Penney and Price (1952) showed that the same solution applied to water waves and presented solutions for incident waves from different directions passing a semi-infinite barrier and for normally incident waves passing through a barrier gap. For the case of normal incidence on a semi-infinite barrier, it may be noted that, for a monochromatic wave, the diffraction coefficient Kd is approximately 0.5 at the edge of the shadow region and that Kd exceeds 1.0 in the ‘undisturbed’ region due to diffraction of the reflected waves caused by the (perfectly) reflecting barrier. Their solution for the case of a barrier gap is essentially the superposition of the results from two mirror image semi-infinite barriers. Their diagrams apply for a range of gap width to wavelength (b/L) from one to five. When b/L exceeds five the diffraction patterns from each barrier do not overlap and hence the semi-infinite barrier solution applies. For b/L less than one the gap acts as a point source and wave energy is radiated as if it were coming from a single point at the centre of the gap. It is important to note here that these diagrams should not be used for design. This is because of the importance of considering directional wave spectra, which are discussed in Chapter 3