Establishment of 3D numerical wave flume and its application to the wave propagation based on SPH method

Waves serve as the fundamental and pervasive driving force in the ocean. The interactions between marine structures and waves have consistently occupied a pivotal position in the field of ocean engineering. In this work, a three-dimensional (3D) numerical wave flume is constructed based on the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) as a complement to the physical tank to study wave propagation. A modified symmetric pressure gradient operator is employed to guarantee momentum conservation and surmount the dissipation. A 3D SPH procedure based on the GPU is developed, and a sponge layer is incorporated to reduce the computational resources while enhancing the computational efficiency. The developed 3D numerical wave tank successfully simulates the problems of regular wave propagation (first-order regular wave, second-order stokes wave), irregular wave propagation (solitary wave, freak wave), and wave-structure interaction (first-order regular wave passes breakwater, second-order stokes wave passes breakwater). The numerical results are in good agreement with the reference solutions, indicating that the current method is an effective and reliable approach for simulating complex wave problems. [Display omitted] •A 3D numerical tank is developed based on the improved SPH method, with GPU computing to reduce the computational cost.•The convergence, accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method are discussed and verified in detail.•The regular and irregular waves are successfully modelled, the results show good agreement with the reference data.