A Poisson-bracket scheme for nonlinear shallow-water sloshing in an oscillating tank with irregular bottom surface

Abstract

The mass-, energy-, and potential-enstrophy-conserving Poisson bracket numerical scheme introduced by Arakawa & Lamb (1981), and extended by Salmon (2004) and Stewart & Dellar (2016), is adapted to the problem of nonlinear shallow-water sloshing over a variable bottom surface in a rigid rectangular basin undergoing a prescribed coupled surge-sway motion. Adaptation to a finite domain requires a new approach to the boundary conditions at solid boundaries in the context of the Arakawa C grid. In this paper, the boundary condition at the vertical walls is taken to be vanishing of the normal derivative of the tangential velocity. This gives zero potential vorticity at the boundary, and is consistent with the material conservation of the potential vorticity. This condition, coupled to symmetric boundary conditions for the wave height arising from a reduced version of the evolution equations at boundaries, leads to an extension of the class of staggered C-grid Poisson-bracket schemes to interior flows with solid boundaries. The scheme is implemented, shown to preserve Casimirs, and applied to a range of problems in shallow water hydrodynamics including interaction of travelling hydraulic jumps at resonance, and X-type soliton interactions over a variable bottom surface. This structure-preserving scheme provides a robust building block for long-time simulation of floating ocean wave energy extractors.