REEF3D::FNPF—A Flexible Fully Nonlinear Potential Flow Solver

Abstract

In situations where the calculation of ocean wave propagation and impact on structures are required, fast numerical solvers are desired in order to find relevant wave events. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)-based numerical wave tanks (NWTs) emphasize on the hydrodynamic details such as fluid–structure interaction, which make them less ideal for the event identification due to the large computational resources involved. Therefore, a computationally efficient numerical wave model is needed to identify the events both for offshore deep-water wave fields and coastal wave fields where the bathymetry and coastline variations have strong impact on wave propagation. In the current paper, a new numerical wave model is represented that solves the Laplace equation for the flow potential and the nonlinear kinematic and dynamics free surface boundary conditions. This approach requires reduced computational resources compared to CFD-based NWTs. The resulting fully nonlinear potential flow solver REEF3D::FNPF uses a σ-coordinate grid for the computations. This allows the grid to follow the irregular bottom variation with great flexibility. The free surface boundary conditions are discretized using fifth-order weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) finite difference methods and the third-order total variation diminishing (TVD) Runge–Kutta scheme for time stepping. The Laplace equation for the potential is solved with Hypre’s stabilized bi-conjugated gradient solver preconditioned with geometric multi-grid. REEF3D::FNPF is fully parallelized following the domain decomposition strategy and the message passing interface (MPI) communication protocol. The numerical results agree well with the experimental measurements in all tested cases and the model proves to be efficient and accurate for both offshore and coastal conditions.