Iche 2014

Recently the single relaxation time Lattice Boltzmann Method (hereinafter LBM) has considerably spread in Computational Hydraulics. Such a diffusion is motivated by the fact that the corresponding numerical algorithm is much simpler than the ones derived from “classical” hydraulic models, such as e.g. the Shallow Water (hereinafter SW) equations. The main drawback of the standard LBMbased model of the SW equations is that it cannot simulate transcritical and supercritical SW flows, which very often occur in realistic situations. Such a serious shortcoming depends on the low number of lattice velocities usually adopted in standard LBM-based models of SW equations. If the number of lattice velocity is arbitrarily increased (i.e. an infinite number of lattice velocity is adopted), numerical simulations of transcritical and supercritical SW flows are possible. This is the basic idea of the Gas Kinetic Method (hereinafter GKM), recently extended to the simulation of SW flows. The aim of this work is to assess the ability of the finite volume formulation of the GKM recently proposed in literature when simulating SW flows in presence of wet/dry fronts and transcritical flows. The assessment is performed through a comparison with a considerable number of benchmark cases, both theoretical and experimental, 1D and 2D. Results are promising.