Parallel Stabilized Finite Element Simulation of Free Surface Flows with Violent Motions

Abstract. Flows with violent free-surface motions occur in several problems in hydrodynamics, such as fuel or water sloshing in tanks, waves breaking in ships, offshore platforms, harbors and coastal areas. The computation of such highly nonlinear flows is challenging since free-surfaces commonly present merging, fragmentation and breaking parts, leading to the use of interface capturing Eulerian approaches. In such methods the surface between two fluids is captured by the use of a marker function which is transported in a flow field. In this work we present a 3D parallel incompressible SUPG/PSPG finite element method to cope with free-surface problems within the interface-capturing context. The incompressible flow and transport problems are solved in a segregated manner. Turbulence effects are modeled with a classical Smagorinsky model. We introduce a Parallel Dynamic Deactivation algorithm to solve the marking equation only in a small region around the interface. The implementation is targeted to distributed memory systems with cache-based processors. The performance of the proposed solution method was tested with the classical Dam Break problem.