High-fidelity simulation of regular waves based on multi-moment finite volume formulation and THINC method

Abstract

The performance of interFoam (a widely used solver within OpenFOAM package) in simulating the propagation of water waves has been reported to be sensitive to the temporal and spatial resolution. To facilitate more accurate simulations, a numerical wave tank is built based on a Navier–Stokes model, which employs the VPM (volume-average/point-value multi-moment) scheme as the fluid solver and the THINC/QQ method (THINC method with quadratic surface representation and Gaussian quadrature) for the free-surface capturing. Simulations of regular waves in an intermediate water depth are conducted and the results are assessed via comparing with the analytical solutions. The performance of the present model and interFoam solver in simulating the wave propagation is systematically compared in this work. The results clearly demonstrate that compared with interFoam solver, the present model significantly improves the dissipation properties of the propagating wave, where the waveforms as well as the velocity distribution can be substantially maintained while the waves propagating over long distances even with large time steps and coarse grids. It is also shown that the present model requires much less computation time to reach a given error level in comparison with interFoam solver.