The weak coupling between MPS and BEM for wave structure interaction simulation

As a Lagrangian type meshless method, the MPS is suitable for violent free surface problems. In this paper, for problems where violent free surface deformation only occur in a constrained area, the efficiency of MPS is further improved by weak coupling with BEM. More specifically, the whole computational domain is modeled by BEM whereas the MPS model only covers the violent flow area. Since the computational time of BEM is negligible compared with the time required by MPS, the overall computational efficiency could be improved by this coupling scheme (depends on how much of the MPS domain is replaced by BEM). The MPS model is advanced by the information from BEM result at each time step up to the time when the free surface is about to break. The MPS solver will continue the simulation with the “old” BEM information just before breaking, based on the assumption that the flow change at the MPS-BEM interface area is small enough. The proposed scheme is validated by two problems and a relatively good accuracy is obtained by comparing with published results in the literature.