Edward Santilli: The Stratified Ocean Model with Adaptive Refinement (SOMAR) (Under the direction of Alberto Scotti)A computational framework for the evolution of non-hydrostatic, baroclinic flows encountered in regional and coastal ocean simulations is presented, which combines the flexibility of Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) with a suite of numerical tools specifically developed to deal with the high degree of anisotropy of oceanic flows and their attendant numerical challenges. This framework introduces a semi-implicit update of the terms that give rise to buoyancy oscillations, which permits a stable integration of the Navier-Stokes equations when a background density stratification is present. The lepticity of each grid in the AMR hierarchy, which serves as a useful metric for anisotropy, is used to select one of several different efficient Poisson-solving techniques. In this way, we compute the pressure over the entire set of AMR grids without resorting to the hydrostatic approximation, which can degrade the structure of internal waves whose dynamics may have large-scale significance. We apply the modeling framework to three test cases, for which numerical or analytical solutions are known that can be used to benchmark the results. In all the cases considered, the model achieves an excellent degree of congruence with the benchmark, while at the same time achieving a substantial reduction of the computational resources needed.
Solving elliptic PDEs in more than one dimension can be a computationally expensive task. For some applications characterised by a high degree of anisotropy in the coefficients of the elliptic operator, such that the term with the highest derivative in one direction is much larger than the terms in the remaining directions, the discretized elliptic operator often has a very large condition number -taking the solution even further out of reach using traditional methods. This paper will demonstrate a solution method for such ill-behaved problems. The high condition number of the D-dimensional discretized elliptic operator will be exploited to split the problem into a series of well-behaved one and (D − 1)dimensional elliptic problems. This solution technique can be used alone on sufficiently coarse grids, or in conjunction with standard iterative methods, such as Conjugate Gradient, to substantially reduce the number of iterations needed to solve the problem to a specified accuracy. The solution is formulated analytically for a generic anisotropic problem using arbitrary coordinates, hopefully bringing this method into the scope of a wide variety of applications.
Instantaneous measurements of pressure and wave flux in stratified incompressible flows are presented for the first time using combined time-resolved particle image velocimetry (PIV) and synthetic schlieren (SS). Corrections induced by variations of the refractive index in this strongly density-stratified fluid are also considered. The test case investigated here is a three-dimensional geometry consisting of a Gaussian ring-type topography forced by an oscillating tide representative of geophysical applications. Density and pressure are reconstructed from SS or PIV in combination with linear theories and combined SS-PIV. We perform a direct comparison between the experimental results and three-dimensional direct numerical simulations of the same flow conditions and control parameters. In particular, we show that the estimated velocity or density and the hence wave flux from linear theory solely based on SS or PIV can be flawed in regions of focusing internal waves. We also show that combined measurements of SS and PIV are capable of circumventing these limitations and accurately reproduce the results computed from the DNS.
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