Numerical Simulation of Wave Overtopping using Mesh Free SPH Method

The process of wave overtopping over a seawall has been numerically simulated in a two-dimensional (2D) domain using the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH), a mesh free particle based method. Suitable numerical techniques, modelling boundaries in particular, have been implemented in order to obtain stable solutions. Detailed study has been reported to know the process of measuring overtopping volume of water in an accurate manner. Present model prediction has been compared with other numerical and experimental based studies on the similar problems. The overall differences between these studies have been found to be within +/- 20%. A separate parametric study has been conducted to investigate the dependence of overtopping volume of water on incident wave frequency and seawall crest level, measured with respect to the still water level. The two major versions of SPH that are currently being applied by several researchers to simulate nonlinear water waves are the Incompressible SPH (ISPH) and Weakly Compressible SPH (WCSPH). Past studies which focused on systematic evaluation of merit of SPH in calculating wave overtopping, mostly adopted the former version i.e., the ISPH. However, in this study the latter version, WCSPH has been adopted in order to investigate its capability in doing the same. Based on the present study, WCSPH also has been found to be fairly reliable to predict the phenomenon of wave overtopping.