Tapping the potential of shallow water model for wave simulations

Abstract

Recent advances in shallow water modelling make accurate water-wave simulations possible, especially in the scope of Boussinesq-type models that take high-order (spatially and temporally) horizontal velocity fields into account. Unlike such models, wave propagations are simulated in this work using a simple one-layer nonhydrostatic model by including the nonhydrostatic terms into the original shallow water equations. The Gudonov-type model proposed is called NUFSA W2D, tested to carry out a simulation of wave propagations with complex flow phenomena such as wet-dry problems, wave-wave, and wave-structure interactions, and able to achieve accurate results. This approach is simple and quite competitive with the Boussinesq-type model. The simplicity also poses enormous possibilities for more advanced engineering applications in the future.