Constrained Hamilton variational principle for shallow water problems and Zu-class symplectic algorithm

Abstract

In this paper, the shallow water problem is discussed. By treating the incompressible condition as the constraint, a constrained Hamilton variational principle is presented for the shallow water problem. Based on the constrained Hamilton variational principle, a shallow water equation based on displacement and pressure (SWE-DP) is developed. A hybrid numerical method combining the finite element method for spatial discretization and the Zu-class method for time integration is created for the SWEDP. The correctness of the proposed SWE-DP is verified by numerical comparisons with two existing shallow water equations (SWEs). The effectiveness of the hybrid numerical method proposed for the SWE-DP is also verified by numerical experiments. Moreover, the numerical experiments demonstrate that the Zu-class method shows excellent performance with respect to simulating the long time evolution of the shallow water.