Implementation and validation of nonlinear wave maker models in a HOS Numerical Wave Tank

This study deals with the development of a novel fully-nonlinear potential flow model for simulating the generation and propagation of 2D or 3D gravity waves in finite depth. This Numerical Wave Tank (NWT) relies on an original non-periodic High-Order Spectral (HOS) model (Bonnefoy et al. (2004) [3]). In this new fully-spectral formulation, propagation of waves is solved in a fully-nonlinear manner, while generation can be modelled up to second order in wavemaker excursion. The resolution is made by means of only Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs), which leads to a fast and accurate method. The efficiency and fast-convergence of this spectral method enable modelization of the shortest wavelengths in a wave tank while keeping reasonable computational efforts. Several validation results are presented where numerical simulations are successfully compared to experiments on different 2D and 3D complex sea-states.