Parametric analysis of the performance of the SPH solutions of unsteady free-surface flow

ABSTRACT

In this article, the performances of the SPH method to solve Shallow Water Equations SWEs with three investigation parameters were studied, such as the type of kernel functions, namely: cubic spline, Gaussian and quintic spline kernels, the number of particles used and the stabilization terms injected, specifically: Lax Friedrichs flux, artificial viscosity and two shocks Riemann solver. Three benchmarking tests make the subject of unsteady free surface flow in this study. It is 1D typical dam-break on wet and dry bottom; 2D partial dam-break on a dry floodplain and 2D partial dam-break on channel with 90° bend. The analysis of the different errors between the numerical and analytical solutions and/or the experimental data shows that the SPH method gives reliable values with the selected optimal parameters which are the cubic kernel function and the artificial viscosity term. The increase in the number of particles increases the precision but also the calculation time.

KEYWORDS:

• SPH
• SWEs
• parameters
• dam-break
• experimental data

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their useful and beneficial comments which clearly have contributed to improve the article. We appreciate also the editor’s support during the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).