BOUSSINESQ MODELING OF SHIP-WAKES AND THEIR CONTRIBUTION TO COASTAL EROSION IN AN ADAPTIVE MESH REFINEMENT SYSTEM

Abstract

Heavy ship traffic causes a growing concern with respect to public safety, potential damage of coastal structures, and corresponding environmental impacts. High-speed ship-generated wakes such as solitons, undular bores, and breaking bores behave differently compared to wind waves and have a great potential for damage in vulnerable areas such as low-energy coasts and wetlands. In this study, we are developing a multi-grid model framework for the Fully Nonlinear Boussinesq Wave Model, FUNWAVE-TVD (Shi et al., 2012), for simulating ship-wakes in both the operational scale and refined process scales using full two-way coupling. Physical processes in areas of interest requiring higher model resolution, such as the ship-wake generation region, wave breaking in the near-field, and wave evolution with wave-structure interaction in the nearshore field, will be modeled in refined grids embedded in the operational-scale domain. A dynamically adaptive grid algorithm is implemented in order to track a vessel and calculate the physical processes precisely in the wave generation and breaking region in the vicinity of the vessel. Both pressure source and panel source methods for ship wave generation will be tested in the model framework. A concept of nesting layers based on the hierarchical basis, and an efficient parallelization method in the context of the full domain partition are utilized to allow the model to deal with a large-scale computation efficiently in a High Performance Computing (HPC) system.