A Numerical Validation of 3D Experimental Dam-Break Wave Interaction with a Sharp Obstacle Using DualSPHysics

Abstract

The presence downstream of a dam of either rigid or erodible obstacles may strongly affect the flood wave propagation, and this complex interaction may lead to further dramatic consequences on people and structures. The open-source Lagrangian-based DualSPHysics solver was used to simulate a three-dimensional dam-break in a closed domain including an oriented obstacle that deflects the flow, thus increasing the complexity of fluid dynamics. By comparing numerical results with experimental data, the effectiveness of the model was evaluated and demonstrated with an extensive sensitivity analysis based on several parameters crucial to the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method, such as the resolution, the boundary conditions, and the properties of the interaction weight function. Charts and summary tables highlight the most suitable conditions for simulating such occurrences in the DualSPHysics framework. The presence of the obstacle, being also an opportunity for observation and study of complex fluid dynamics, opens the way to investigate the fluid interaction with solid objects involved in dam-break events and, possibly, to predict their effect with respect to the relative position between them and the flood and other relevant parameters. Finally, the numerical model presents a good overall agreement.

Semi-Analytical Characterization of a Sloshing Fluid Mass With the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamic Based Method

“…The novel procedure is able to avoid the nonphysical gap between boundary and fluid particles that occur in dry boundary-wet boundary transition phases even using coarse resolution; this makes the mDBC perfectly suitable for the purpose of this work especially for the modeling of sloshing fluid masses. Details about their implementation are in [35] in which a sloshing tank with very energetic motion is validated; other application can be found in Capasso et al [38] and Ruffini et al [39].…”

“…During the last few years, the code has seen an increase in availability of functionalities that are very apt for the simulation of Fluid-Structure Interaction in different engineering fields, ranging from renewable energy device [19,20,21] to hydroelasticity problems [22,23,24,25]. The code, moreover, proved its reliability for nearly any kind of free-surface flow interacting with rigid structures: dambreak-induced violent flows on downhill structures [26,27], coastal breakwaters [28,29] or floating objects [30,31,32]. Sloshing simulations as well have been performed using DualSPHysics.…”

Simulating the 1976 Teton Dam Failure using Geoclaw and HEC-RAS and comparing with Historical Observations

“…Additionally, although specific 3D models can simulate dam-breaks (including depicting pressures using nonhydrostatic terms), the computational cost of a 3D model for simulating dam-break phenomena is substantial. For example, 3D models often require higher resolution topography, they solve additional terms at each time step, and require technological advances in high-performance computing or access to computing resources one might not have for parallel processing (Hu et al, 2018;Capasso et al, 2021).…”

Application of an SPH-DEM Coupled Model for Elastic Fluid–Structure Interaction

“…To enhance the DBC formulation, the modified Dynamic Boundary Conditions (mDBC) [26] has been developed and validated [27,28]. The particle arrangement remains the same as in the DBC, while a mirroring technique [29] helps compute smoother pressure fields by using ghost nodes located in the fluid domain, where the properties are found through a first-order consistent SPH spatial interpolation [30] over the surrounding fluid particles only.…”