Tsunami Forecasting

The elbe code features 1D and 2D shallow water models on the basis of D1Q3 and D2Q9 Lattice-Boltzmann discretizations. At the wet-dry interface, a simple step-algorithm is applied. The viscous dissipation of breaking waves is represented by a breaker model. Thanks to the simplified numerical model and the GPGPU acceleration of the solver, numerical results can be obtained faster than in real-time.

Fukushima (2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami)

 

Left: Bathymetry data. White rectangles show the computational domain on grid levels II-IV. Right: Water surface elevation. Snapshot of the simulation at one selected time step. (both rendered with conventional techniques).

Water surface elevation. Snapshot of the simulation at one selected time step, this time rendered in elbeVIS.

Near-field impact and flooding

 

Wave impact on engineering structures is one of the most popular applications of free surface flow solvers. Apart from single obstacles in the flow, scenarios which involve more complete and complex geometries are of great interest. From the numerical point of view, these test cases are demanding due to high Reynolds numbers and large compuational domains, which ask for massively parallel computing to tackle the simulations. The impact of a wave on South Manhattan is shown here in order to demonstrate the capability of the elbe free surface solver to deal with complex geometries of large scale. A 1:10 scale model is used and discretized with a grid spacing of Δx = 0.23m. The wave is generated by a breaking dam scenario. It can be observed that detailed information on the liquid entry after the initial wave impact can be obtained.