A Sharp Free Surface Finite Volume Method Applied to Gravity Wave Flows

Abstract: This paper presents a sharp free surface method for fully nonlinear flow of two immiscible phases for wave propagation problems in the Finite Volume framework. The method resolves a sharp interface between two phases by combining the geometric reconstruction Volume-of-Fluid scheme isoAdvector for accurate advection of the free surface with the Ghost Fluid Method for the consistent treatment of density and pressure gradient discontinuities at the free surface. The method uses a compact computational stencil irrespective of cell shape and is formally second-order accurate in time and space. The primary focus of this work is to present the combined method and verify and validate it for wave-related problems in ocean sciences, marine and coastal engineering, by considering the following test cases: i) wave propagation of a two-dimensional wave with moderate steepness, ii) green water (water-on-deck) simulations for a ship model with violent free surface flow patterns. The method is implemented in OpenFOAM, an open source software for Computational Fluid Dynamics.