Simulation of a 3D Numerical Viscous Wave Tank

A numerical scheme was developed to solve the unsteady three-dimensional (3D) Navier–Stokes equations and the fully nonlinear free surface boundary conditions for simulating a 3D numerical viscous wave tank. The finite-analytic method was used to discretize the partial differential equations, and the marker-and-cell method was extended to treat the 3D free surfaces. A piston-type wave generator was incorporated in the computational domain to generate the desired incident waves. This wave tank model was applied to simulate the generation and propagation of a solitary wave in the wave tank and the diffraction of periodic waves by a semiinfinite breakwater. The computation was carried out by a PC cluster established by connecting several personal computers. The message passing interface (MPI) parallel language and MPICH software were used to write the computer code for parallel computing. High consistency between the numerical results and the theoretical solutions for the wave and velocity profiles confirms the accuracy of the proposed wave tank model.