CFC2023

A Free-Surface Incompressible Navier-Stokes Spectral Element Model for Simulation of Water Waves

  • Melander, Anders (Technical University of Denmark)
  • Lisegaard, Jesper (Technical University of Denmark)
  • Bitsch, Max (Technical University of Denmark)
  • Engsig-Karup, Allan (Technical University of Denmark)

Please login to view abstract download link

The ability to simulate water waves while considering structures and the sea floor is important for offshore engineering. We present a new free-surface incompressible Navier-Stokes solver discretized in space using a high-order nodal spectral element method (SEM) [1]. Spatial discretization using SEM allows for the simulation of wave propagation as well as wave-structure interaction through the use of unstructured meshes to handle the representation of complex geometries. Research in recent years has demonstrated the capabilities of SEM for solving fully nonlinear potential flow equations [2] and that it for certain applications come with improved efficiency through reduction of degrees of freedom using high-order elements over traditional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools relying on low-order discretization methods such as VOF [3]. In this talk we will present a CFD solver based on SEM and evaluate the performance of the new solver through numerical experiments for established benchmarks. Preliminary results of a high-performance computing implementation on modern many-core hardware allowing for parallel computations with SEM will be highlighted.