Numerical investigation of the interactions between solitary waves and pile breakwaters using BGK-based methods

The interactions between a solitary wave, which can be used to model a leading tsunami wave, and a pile breakwater made of circular cylinders are numerically investigated. We use the depth-averaged shallow water equations, which are solved by the finite volume method based on the Bhatnagar–Gross–Krook (BGK) model. The numerical results are compared with the experimental data, which yields very good agreement between them when the ratio of wave height to water depth is small (<0.25). As this ratio exceeds the value of 0.25, the larger the ratio is, the bigger deviation of numerical results from experimental data is observed, the possible reasons for this observation are discussed. Both numerical and experimental results indicate that the transmission of the solitary wave decreases and the reflection of the wave increases with reducing gaps between the adjacent cylinders, and that both transmission and reflection coefficients are not very sensitive to the variation in wave height.