Incompressible SPH simulation of wave interaction with porous structure

• An improved interface boundary treatment is proposed for the ISPH porous flow model.
• The model is validated for solitary wave damping and interaction with breakwater.
• Continuity of dynamic pressures near the interface is well achieved.
• Improvement of the interface boundary is demonstrated by comparing results.
• Realistic flow fields inside and around the porous structure are simulated.

In this paper an incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (ISPH) method is applied to investigate the flow motion in and around the porous structure. In order to describe in a simple and effective way the flow through the interface between the porous region and pure fluid region within the SPH framework, a heuristic boundary treatment method has been proposed. The ISPH model is first verified against a theoretical model of wave propagation over a porous bed and then further validated by comparing the predicted wave surface profiles and flow velocity fields with the experiment data for a typical case of flow motion around and inside a submerged porous structure. The good agreement has demonstrated that the improved ISPH model developed in this work is capable of modelling wave interaction with porous structures.