Evaluations of SWEs and SPH numerical modelling techniques for dam break flows

Abstract

The standard shallow water equations (SWEs) model is often considered to provide weak solutions to the dam-break flows due to its depth-averaged shock-capturing scheme assumptions. In this study, an improved SWEs model using a recently proposed Surface Gradient Upwind Method (SGUM) is used to compute dam-break flows in the presence of a triangular hump. The SGUM allows the SWEs model to stably and accurately reproduce the highly complex shock currents caused by the dam-break event, as it improves the treatment of SWEs numerical source terms, which is particularly crucial for simulating the wet/dry front interface of the dam-break flow. Besides, an Incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (ISPH) modeling technique is also employed in this study to compare with the performance of the SGUM-SWEs model. The SPH method is totally mesh free and thus it can efficiently track the large free surface deformation. The ISPH approach uses a strictly incompressible two-step semi-implicit solution method. By reproducing a documented experimental dam-break flow, it has demonstrated that both model simulation results gave good agreement with the experimental data at different measurement locations. However, the ISPH simulations showed a better prediction of the dam-break peak wave building-up time, where its superiority was demonstrated. Furthermore, the ISPH model could also predict more detailed flow surface profiles across the streamwise flow direction and the velocity and pressure structures.