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Breaking waves
An ability to simulate steep and overturning waves, and predict the loads generated by them, is of great importance in naval architecture, marine and coastal engineering. The solution method is based on the volume of fluid (VOF) technique in which the fractional volume of air and water is calculated in each computational cell at each time step. An advantage of the VOF technique is that it can be used to simulate fragmentation and remerging of the free surface such as occurs when a wave breaks. However, it can lead to smearing of the interface and the simulation of free surface waves of even moderate amplitude can be very CPU intensive, requiring a very large number of calculation cells and very small time steps. To address this problem, rather than using a structured grid of the same sized rectangular elements, hierarchical meshes that provide resolution locally at the deforming free surface are used. The free surface curve is updated at each time step and used to generate the calculation grid.
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| (a) T=1.617 | (b) T=6.466 |
| Collapse of a water column |
| Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering