Weakly compressible SPH simulation of cnoidal waves with strong plunging breakers

Hydrodynamics of highly nonlinear cnoidal waves and their subsequent strong plunging breakers are among the least understood and most significant issues in coastal engineering. In this work, a weakly compressible smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) formulation is used for the study of the generation and propagation of cnoidal waves and investigation of the characteristics of the induced strong plunging breakers. Numerical results show the capability of the SPH scheme for properly simulating the cnoidal waves. For the case of strong plunging breakers, dynamic and kinematic features of the flow are computed and compared with certain implementations of other numerical techniques. SPH is shown to be more accurate compared with other numerical techniques. Power spectral density of both horizontal and vertical dynamic velocities at still water level demonstrates existing of 2D isotropy of dynamics for a typical beach profile with cross-section of slowly varying bottom.