NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE INTERACTIONS BETWEEN SOLITARY WAVES AND PILE BREAKWATERS

The interactions between a solitary wave. which can be used to model a leading tsunamis wave. and a pile breakwater made of circular cylinders are investigated numerically The propagation of in initial solitary wave into still Water with constant depth is modeled by nonlinear depth-averaged shallow water equations. which are solved by the Finite volume method based on the Bhatnagar-Gross-Krook (BGK) model The transmission and reflection coefficients predicted by the numerical simulations agree well with those by the experiments when the ratio of wave height to water depth is small (<0.25), which yields a mean percentage deviation 5% for the transmission coefficient and 20% for the reflection coefficient As this ratio exceeds the value of 0.25, the larger this ratio is, the bigger deviation of numerical results from experimental data is observed This fact indicates the limitation of the depth-averaged shallow water equations to such type of problems and the reason For this is discussed.