Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics for water wave propagation in a channel

Abstract

In this paper, Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is used to simulate the propagation of waves in an intermediate depth water channel. The major advantage of using SPH is that no special treatment of the free surface is required, which is advantageous for simulating highly nonlinear flows with possible wave breaking. The SPH method has an option of different formulations with their own advantages and drawbacks to be implemented. Here, we apply the classical and Arbitrary Lagrange–Euler (ALE) formulation for wave propagation in a water channel. The classical SPH should come with an artificial viscosity which stabilizes the numerical algorithm and increases the accuracy. Here, we will show that the use of classical SPH with an artificial viscosity may cause the waves in the channel to decay. On the other hand, we will show that using the ALE-SPH algorithm with a Riemann solver is more stable, and in addition to producing the pressure fields with much less numerical noise, the waves propagate in the channel without dissipation.