Open Access

ARTICLE

Modelling a Plunging Breaking Solitary Wave with Eddy-Viscosity Turbulent SPH Models

R. Issa¹, D. Violeau¹

1 EDF R&D, LNHE, Chatou, FRANCE.

Computers, Materials & Continua 2008, 8(3), 151-164. https://doi.org/10.3970/cmc.2008.008.151

Abstract

Breaking waves can run up at the shoreline, inundating coastal regions and causing large property damage and loss of life. In order to proceed to the design of sea defence structures and estimate the possible damage resulting from sea submersion due to a tsunami for instance, it is thus crucial to understand these phenomena. However, due to the mathematical difficulties caused by the complexities of the fluid motion associated with breaking wave, a fully theoretical approach is not possible. Thus most of the investigations regarding breaking waves are experimental and numerical. Some methods were recently developed to perform such simulations, among them Volume Of Fluids (VOF) and Lagrangian methods. In this paper, the gridfree Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is used. SPH is preferencially used in CFD to simulate complex flows with one or several convoluted free surfaces. Indeed, this type of flows would require distorted meshes with Eulerian finite difference methods or very fine meshes with VOF. The ability of SPH to reproduce a plunging breaking solitary wave and to simulate the different stages of its process is herein investigated. Since breaking waves are characterised by high distorsion, turbulence modelling plays a crucial role in such simulations. Therefore, the turbulence models developed by the authors and presented in earlier publications [\relax \begingroup \catcode `\ 12\relax \catcode `\\12\relax \catcode `\$12\relax \catcode `\&12\relax \catcode `\#12\relax \catcode `\^12\relax \catcode `\_12\relax \catcode `\%12\relax \catcode `\~12\relax \endgroup \relax \cite *{dv_ri:2006}] are here applied. The results, compared to experiments, are on the whole satisfactory, specially the simulation of the splashup phenomenon. Moreover, it is shown that turbulence modelling has a strong influence on the quality of the results.

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