Highly directionally spread, overturning breaking waves modelled with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics: A case study involving the Draupner wave

Taiga Kanehira, Mark McAllister, Sam Draycott, Takuji Nakashima, Ton van den Bremer, Naokazu Taniguchi, David Ingram, Hidemi Mutsuda

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

Wave breaking in the ocean affects the height of extreme waves, energy dissipation, and interaction between the atmosphere and upper ocean. Numerical modelling is a critical step in understanding the physics of wave breaking and offers insight that is hard to gain from field data or experiments. High-fidelity numerical modelling of three-dimensional breaking waves is extremely challenging. Conventional grid-based numerical methods struggle to model the steep and double-valued free surfaces that occur during wave breaking. The Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method does not fall prey to these issues. Herein, we examine the SPH method’s ability to model highly directionally spread overturning breaking waves by numerically reproducing the experiments presented in McAllister et al. (2019). We find that the SPH method reproduces the experimental observations well; when comparing experimental and numerical measurements we achieve coefficient of determination values of
, with some smaller-scale features less well reproduced owing to finite resolution. We also examine aspects of the simulated wave’s geometry and kinematics and find that existing breaking criteria are difficult to apply in highly directionally spread conditions.
Original languageEnglish
Article number101822
Number of pages14
JournalOcean modelling
Volume164
Early online date8 Jun 2021
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 8 Jun 2021

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • Wave breaking
  • Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics
  • Directional spreading
  • Freak Waves

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