Wave breaking in the surf zone and deep-water in a non-hydrostatic RANS model. Part 2: Turbulence and mean circulation

Abstract

Field-scale modeling of wave-breaking-induced turbulence and mean circulation is still challenging. Although Boussinesq-type models have been successfully used to study field-scale wave transformation and wave-breaking-driven circulation, they cannot provide turbulence or the vertical structure of the velocity field. In addition, the applicability of such models is limited to shallow water. In Part 1 (Derakhti et al., 2016b) of this study, we showed that the non-hydrostatic σ-coordinate RANS model NHWAVE, as described by Derakhti et al. (2016a), accurately predicts organized wave motions and total wave-breaking-induced energy dissipation from deep-water up to the swash zone using a few vertical σ-layers. In this paper, our goal is to examine what level of detail of wave-breaking-induced turbulence and mean circulation, both in depth- and steepness-limited breaking waves, can be reproduced by NHWAVE. Further, effects of modeled turbulent eddy viscosity on the predicted time-averaged velocity distribution is discussed. We establish that NHWAVE is capable of predicting the structure of the mean velocity and vorticity fields including large-scale breaking-induced coherent vortices in deep-water breaking events; where the absence of turbulence-induced eddy viscosity results in the overprediction of the velocity and vorticity field in the breaking region. We show that NHWAVE reduces the required CPU time up to two orders of magnitude in comparison with a comparable VOF-based simulation.