A novel efficient and robust treatment of the friction source term in 2D shallow water inundation models

Abstract

The technological advancements of the last few decades have fostered the use of two-dimensional (2D) Shallow water Equations (SWE) flood simulations not only in academic research but also in practical real-world applications and territorial planning. The evaluation of flow resistance due to friction is crucial as it plays a relevant role in a variety of flow conditions. However, problems arise in dam-break and overland flow applications involving very small water depth because the time scale connected to the friction term may be much smaller than the hydrodynamic time scale. To cope with this issue, known as source term stiffness, an implicit treatment of the friction term is frequently adopted in Finite Volume (FV) numerical schemes, but there are cases (null roughness coefficient or null flow velocity) where a division by zero may occur during calculations, leading to a crash of the algorithm. Herein, we propose a reformulation of the implicit friction term that is general, more stable and computationally efficient (with a speed-up of approximately 3 times for the routine running the friction computation) than currently available approaches. The novel implicit method allows to manage special conditions with null roughness or null discharge, without resorting to ad-hoc thresholds, and can be easily implemented in existing schemes with pointwise friction treatment. The novel friction approach is implemented in a purposely simple FV numerical scheme (hydrostatic reconstruction to account for the bed slope terms, first-order accuracy in time and space) - to better focus on the friction term treatment - and it is validated against analytical, synthetic, laboratory and real-world case studies, showing promising capabilities.