Nonlinear wave interaction with curved front seawalls

Abstract The hydrodynamic performance of three prevalent curved front seawalls along with a vertical seawall has been investigated in the Ursell number ranging from 8 to 16. Experiments have been conducted to measure dynamic pressure on these seawalls under the action of regular monochromatic waves. Two different numerical models have been used to analyse the measured data: An in house Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) particle based model and the commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) package ANSYS- FLUENT®. The numerical simulation of peak dynamic pressures on the seawall front surface differs with the laboratory measurements by less than 10% while, the maximum velocity magnitude reveals differences of the order of 20–30% between SPH and FLUENT during overtopping of the wave. The comparison between these models shows that the performance of improved SPH models is similar to that of FLUENT, as long as the flow is laminar. The SPH solution contains several important nonlinear aspects also revealed in the experiments. The comparison of measured and simulated pressures along the curved front proves the capability of the SPH models in predicting the nature of run-up and overtopping, if occurs.