Implicit finite volume simulation of 2D shallow water flows in flexible meshes

In this work, an implicit method for solving 2D hyperbolic systems of equations is presented, focusing on the application to the 2D shallow water equations. It is based on the first order Roe's scheme, in the framework of finite volume methods. A conservative linearization is done for the flux terms, leading to a non-structured matrix for unstructured meshes thus requiring iterative methods for solving the system. The validation is done by comparing numerical and exact solutions in both unsteady and steady cases. In order to test the applicability of the implicit scheme to real world situations, a laboratory scale tsunami simulation is carried out and compared to the experimental data. The implicit schemes have the advantage of the unconditional stability, but a quality loss in the transient solution can appear for high CFL numbers. The properties of the scheme are well suited for the simulation of unsteady shallow water flows over irregular topography using all kind of meshes. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.