Application of Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics to Particular Flow Cases Solved by Saint-Venant Equations

Abstract

Smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) is a Lagrangian mesh free particle method which has been developed and widely applied to different areas in engineering. Recently, the SPH method has also been used to solve the shallow water equations, resulting in (SPH-SWEs) formulations. With the significant developments made, SPH-SWEs provide an accurate computational tool for solving problems of wave propagation, flood inundation, and wet-dry interfaces. Capabilities of the SPH method to solve Saint-Venant equations have been tested using a SPH-SWE code to simulate different hydraulic test cases. Results were compared to other established and commercial hydraulic modelling packages that use Eulerian approaches. The test cases cover non-uniform steady state profiles, wave propagation, and flood inundation cases. The SPH-SWEs simulations provided results that compared well with other established and commercial hydraulic modeling packages. Nevertheless, SPH-SWEs simulations experienced some drawbacks such as loss of inflow water volume of up to 2%, for 2D flood propagation. Simulations were carried out using an open source solver, named SWE-SPHysics.

Keywords

• smoothed particle hydrodynamics
• Saint-Venant equations
• flooding
• wave propagation