Derivation of an improved smoothed particle hydrodynamics model for establishing a three-dimensional numerical wave tank overcoming excessive numerical dissipation

This paper presents an improved smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) model through a rigorous mathematical derivation based on the principle of virtual work, aiming at establishing a three-dimensional numerical wave tank overcoming excessive numerical dissipation that has been usually encountered in traditional SPH models in practical applications. In order to demonstrate the accuracy and convergence of the new scheme, the viscous damping of a standing wave is first investigated as a quantitative validation, with particular attention on emphasizing (1) its physical rationality with respect to energy conservation and (2) its ability to alleviate wave over-attenuation even using fewer neighbors compared with the traditional δ-SPH model. Subsequently, several fully three-dimensional engineering problems, with respect to water wave propagation and the interaction with structures, are investigated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new scheme in alleviating wave over-attenuation. It is demonstrated that the present model can be performed with relatively few neighbors (i.e., higher computational efficiency) to obtain accurate and convergent numerical results for those SPH simulations involving long-term and long-distance water wave propagation.