On the SPH Approximations in Modeling Water Waves

Abstract

Abstract This paper presents an examination of approximation aspects of the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) in modeling the water wave phenomenon. Close attention is paid on consistency of the SPH formulation and its relation with a correction technique applied to improve the method accuracy. The considerations are confined to flow fields within finite domains with a free surface and fixed solid boundaries with free slip boundary conditions. In spite of a wide application of the SPH method in fluid mechanics, the appropriate modeling of the boundaries is still not clear. For solid straight line boundaries, a natural way is to use additional (virtual, ghost) particles outside the boundary and take into account mirror reflection of associated field variables. Such a method leads to good results, except for a vicinity of solid horizontal bottoms where, because of the SPH approximations in the description of pressure, a stratification of the fluid material particles may occur. In order to illustrate the last phenomenon, some numerical tests have been made. These numerical experiments show that the solid fluid bottom attracts the material particles and thus, to prevent these particles from penetration into the bottom, a mutual exchange of positions of real and ghost particles has been used in a computation procedure.