Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements 58 (2015) 7985

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Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/enganabound

Fully nonlinear wave interaction with an array of truncated barriers

in three dimensional numerical wave tank
Arash Abbasnia, Mahmoud Ghiasi n
Department of Marine Technology, Amirkabir University of Technology, Hafez Ave. No. 424, Tehran, Iran

art ic l e i nf o

a b s t r a c t

Article history:
Received 14 June 2014
Received in revised form
24 February 2015
Accepted 23 March 2015

Wave transition due to coinciding with an array of truncated barrier is simulated by a fully nonlinear
three dimensional potential Numerical Wave Tank (NWT). The potential theory is used to describe
kinematics of the ow eld and the isoparametric Boundary Element Method (BEM) is employed to
solve the boundary value problem. The Mixed EulerianLagrangian (MEL) approach and fourth order
RungeKutta time integration applied for time-marching scheme to model the temporary and fully
nonlinear free surface. At each time step, solution of Laplace equation in the Eulerian frame is applied to
the fully nonlinear free surface conditions in the Lagrangian manner to achieve the new positions and
the boundary value of uid particles for the next time step. Normal ux of potential wave theory is
specied on the inow boundary to stimulate uid eld and to propagate the nonlinear wave along the
tank. To minimize the reected wave energy into the computational domain, two articial sponger layers
are adopted on the free surface at the both ends of the numerical wave tank. Accuracy and convergence
of the present numerical procedure is conducted. Also, interaction between a near trapped mode array of
truncated barriers and nonlinear input wave is simulated.
& 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Fully nonlinear
Numerical wave tank
Truncated barriers array
Mixed EulerianLagrangian method
Boundary element method

1. Introduction
Shore protection to keep safe the oating marine structures
from ocean waves is so interesting in the ocean engineering.
Hence, simulation of the nonlinear wave interaction with an array
of truncated wave barriers can be considered from two viewpoints
including wave deformation and optimizing array conguration to
maximize the wave energy decadence. Wave interaction with the
different array of cylinders has been studied numerically since past
three decades. Perturbation theory was employed by Taylor and
Hung [4] for numerical modelling of wave interaction with a
transverse array of cylinders. Maniar and Newman [11] used the
linear diffraction theory to simulate linear wave interaction with a
long array of cylinders in the frequency domain. They found that
trapped mode varies for different number of cylinders. Indeed,
exciting hydrodynamic force on the cylinders adjacent to the
centre of array grows up largely when incident wave number is
close to trapped mode. Time domain simulation based on Finite
Element Method (FEM) and second order wave diffraction theory
was conducted by Wang and Wu [17] for different congurations
of the cylinder array near the trapped mode frequency interacting

Corresponding author. Tel.: 98 21 66419615; fax: 98 21 66412495.

E-mail address: mghiasi@aut.ac.ir (M. Ghiasi).

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enganabound.2015.03.015
0955-7997/& 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

with linear wave. A similar work was carried out by them using a
numerical wave tank based on nite element method [14]. Their
numerical results include determination of wave elevations on the
front side and the rear side cylinders and calculation of hydrodynamics force and momentum.
Potential numerical wave tank procedure was summarized by
Tanizawa [15] and has been developed for temporal simulation of
nonlinear wave interaction with the oating and xed single
bodies by Koo and Kim [7,8]. Further, prediction of Bragg reection
due to variable bottom was conducted for the incident regular and
irregular waves in the NWT by Tang and Huang [14], Ning et al.
[13] and Abbasnia and Ghiasi [1], respectively. Their results
included the prediction of the wave transmission and energy
decrement of waves over the ripple patch on the bottom and the
submerged barriers for different congurations in a NWT. In the
potential NWT, nite element method and boundary element
method have been employed to solve boundary value problem at
each time step to nd kinematics of the free surface particles.
The Mixed Eulerian and Lagrangian method (MEL) introduced
by Longuet-Higgins and Cokelet [9] can be used to update the
temporary free surface in the Lagrangian manner. First order and
second order nite difference formulation was employed in
numerical wave tank by Wu et al. [18] and Xiao et al. [19] as low
order time integration methods for time marching scheme. Fourth
order RungeKutta method was deployed by Koo and Kim [8], and

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A. Abbasnia, M. Ghiasi / Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements 58 (2015) 7985

fth orders RungeKuttaGil and fourth order AdamsBashforth

Moulton methods were used by Zhang et al. [20] to update the free
surface as high order integration scheme. A wave maker should be
imposed on the xed inow boundary to disturb the computational domain as shown by Tanizawa [15]. Hence, the normal
derivatives of the theoretical incident wave velocity potential (the
potential normal ux) can be specied on the inow boundary
acting as an articial wave maker. The incident wave is reected
from the end wall tank to the computational domain and for a long
time simulation, the numerical solution would be affected. Therefore, an articial damping zone should be adopted on a specic
length of the free surface in front of the end wall to minimize the
wave reection. It can be considered by adding a damping
coefcient to the fully nonlinear free surface boundary conditions
on a particular length in front of the end wall addressed by Cointe
[3].
In this paper, the interaction of waves with an array of ten barriers
which is a fully nonlinear phenomenon is simulated for different
width of the tank. Three dimensional isoparametric bilinear boundary
element method formulated by Brebbia and Dominguez [2] is
implemented to solve the Laplace equation in the Eulerian frame.
The material node approach and fourth order RungeKutta time
integration scheme are used to update the fully nonlinear free surface.
An articial wave maker is adopted on the inow boundary and an
articial damping zone is used to keep the open water condition.
Nonlinear wave propagation within the three dimensional NWT is
compared with the analytical results. Also, performance of damping
zones is tested. Accuracy and convergence of the present numerical
procedure are examined for different mesh sizes. Propagation of a
steep incident wave is chosen to examine the NWT for modelling the
free surface nonlinearity. The horizontal hydrodynamic force on the
barriers is compared for two different tank widths. Also, wave
transmission and wave reection due to a group of barriers near the
trapped mode are computed.

2. Mathematical formulations
As shown in Fig. 1, an array of barriers is placed in a numerical
wave tank with depth d, width W and length L.
A right-hand Cartesian coordinates system is located on the
intersection of the calm free surface and the right upstream edge so
that the z-axis is positive upward and the x-axis is along the length of
tank. The barrier group is extending on whole width of the tank. It is
assumed that the uid is incompressible, inviscid and the ow is
irrotational. Hence, the potential theory can describe the uid ow
with the three dimensional Laplace equation as
2 0

Wave Maker

Barrier 1

Barrier 2

in the uid domain t . On the rigid tank walls including the bottom
surface (SB ), the lateral walls (SW ) and the downstream end tank wall
(SO ), the zero ux of potential is imposed as
! !
U n 0
2
!
where n is the unit normal vector directed out of the uid boundary.
The boundary condition on the barriers surface (SH ) is written as
! !
V Un
3
n
!
where V is velocity of the bodies. For xed barriers it is equal to zero.
Based on the material node approach, dynamic and kinematic of
boundary conditions on the exact free surface (SF ) in the Lagrangian
manner are written as

1! !
 g U
2
t
!
!

4
t
!
where is the wave elevation and g is the gravity acceleration. is
position of the free surface computational nodes which is allowed to
move with the free surface particles. =t is operator of total time
derivative. Damping zone is deployed on a specic length of the free
surface (Ld ) in front of the downstream tank end wall. Hence, an
articial viscous term is added to the both free surface boundary
conditions as follows:



1
! ! 
 g U  x  e
2
t
!

! ! 
!
5
 x  e
t
where the subscript e corresponds to the reference conguration of
the uid. The function x is damping coefcient dened as

2
K
2
6
x
x  x0 ; x0 r x r x1 x0
2
K
in which, is the characteristic wave frequency and K is the
characteristic wave number. Parameters of and control the
strength and extent of the damping zone, respectively. x0 and x1
indicate the longitudinal position of damping zone span on the free
!
surface. The terms e and e are the reference values. When
reference values are set for calm water condition (e 0; 0), the
damping zone acts as simple absorber. The boundary condition on the
upstream end tank wall (SI ) as an articial wave maker can be written
as
!

!
 I U n
n

where I is theoretical input wave potential.

Barrier 3

Free-Surface

Damping Zone

Bottom

y
x

d
a

Lcy
W

L
Fig. 1. Denition sketch of a numerical tank.

Ld

A. Abbasnia, M. Ghiasi / Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements 58 (2015) 7985

1.5

81

3D NWT
Analytic

1
0.5
0
-0.5
-1

30

32

34

36

38

40

t/T

Fig. 2. Time history of the free surface evolution at x L=3 for the second order Stokes wave.

The direct boundary integral based on the Green second

identity is used to solve the Laplace equation:
0

!

! ! 1

!G ; p

! 
!  Z



B ! !
C

c p p @G ; p
Ad
n
n

where c p p =4 , and p is the exterior solid angle made by

the boundary at the source point p. is integrating boundary
!!
surface including SB , SW , SO , SH , SF and SI . G ; p is the three
dimensional free space Green function dened as [2]

! ! 
1
1
9
G ; p ! ! 

! ! 


4   p  4 r ; p
!
!
where p and are the location of source and eld points,
respectively. The solution of the boundary value problem is used
to update the instantaneous free surface boundary by fourth order
time integration scheme. To avoid the so called saw-tooth instability in the free surface simulation of highly nonlinear wave during a
long time simulation by MEL method, a smoothing scheme is
employed in time marching. To remove the non-physical oscillations, the variable-node-space Chebyshev fth point smoothing
scheme is used at every 520 time steps.



where ; A  1; 1 is the intrinsic coordinate system hold on
the reference element k. Variation description of the geometry and
the boundary value for each element can be written as
 X 
 k
!
; i N ki ; !
12
xi

 X k

U ;
N ; ki
i i

where i is the number of nodes within each element and N ki is the

!k
polynomial shape function. x i and ki are coordinates and
!
boundary values of the element k nodal points, respectively. J k
is the Jacobian matrix of the elements dened as
8 ! 9
n
>
>
>
>
=
< !
!
14
J k =
>
>
>
>
;
: !
=
and,
k
Nj

j
B
j 1 pj n

XNc

! ! 

!G ; p

j1

To solve Eq. (8), the boundary surface is discretized by isoparametric bilinear quadratic elements. When the boundaries are
coinciding, complexity is occurred. Double nodes and triple nodes
approaches are employed to remove the boundary value discontinuity of points on the intersection edge of two boundary surfaces
and three boundary surfaces, respectively. The boundaries are
discretized into Ne elements and N c nodal points are used to
transform Eq. (8) into summation of integrals over the boundary
elements as following:

!
Z

! ! 
d
G ;p
n

Z
XNc XNe

!
 ! ! 

j
k
J

G
;

d d
p
k
j
j1
k1
n
k
10

 ! 
XNc XNe Z
G ; ; p ! 

k

Nj ;
 J k ; d dj
j1
k1
n
k
XNc

A
11
j 1 pj j

0;


N kj ; ;

j2
=k
jAk

15

Apj and Bpj is global array of Neumann and Dirichlet matrices,

respectively. Using Eqs. (10) and (11), the discretized form of
Eq. (8) can be written as
XNc

3. Numerical implementation

13

XN c

j
cp pj  Apj j
B
j 1 pj n

16

where pj is the Kronecker delta function. Rigid mode method

addressed by Grilli et al. [6] is employed to obtain diagonal term of
a row of LHS of Eq. (16). The regular integral is evaluated
numerically by Bi-directional Gauss-Legendre quadrature method.
In each time step, solution of the boundary integral equation is
applied in Eq. (4) to evaluate the total time derivative of the free
surface node potential and coordinates. Fourth order RungeKutta
time integration is used to update the instantaneous nonlinear
free surface.

4. Numerical results
The second order regular wave potential is specied on the
inow boundary as below:

I 1I 2I

17

where and is the rst order and second order of the

potential wave theory given as [14]
1
I

2
I

1I

Hg cosh K z d
sin Kx  t
2 cosh Kd

18

2I

3 2 cosh 2K z d
H
sin 2Kx  t
4
32
sinh Kd

19

!

where H, and K are the wave height, the angular frequency and
the wave number of the incident wave, respectively. To examine the

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A. Abbasnia, M. Ghiasi / Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements 58 (2015) 7985

three dimensional numerical wave tank, a second order Stokes wave

with
H 0:01d is chosen to propagate within the tank when
p
d=g 1:010. A numerical wave probe is adopted at x L=3 to
record the wave elevation. Fig. 2 shows the time history of the free
surface evolution and the comparison with the analytical results. The
grid size in the length of tank is taken x =30 in which 2 =K
and the time step size is taken t T=30 in which T 2 =.
It shows that the numerical solutions are in good agreement
with the analytical results. The damping zone used to reduce the
wave reection from the end wall tank and to obtain appropriate

Table 1
The wave reection from the tank end wall for different
damping zone characteristics.

K r (%)

1.0
1.0
1.0
1.5
3.0

1.0
2.0
3.0
2.0
2.0

1.041
1.035
1.033
1.045
1.071

numerical solutions. For the different

of the damp characteristics

ing zone, the wave reection K r H r =H 0  1  100 of the tank
end wall is measured based on the Goda and Suzuki [5] approach
as shown in Table 1. H r represents the wave height of the recorded
wave elevation by the numerical wave probe and H 0 is the wave
height for the open sea condition.
It is shown that if the dissipation of the wave energy is too
weak, a part of energy is reected back to the computational
domain from the tank end wall. On the contrary, if the damping
strength () is too strong, the damping zone will act as a rigid
boundary and the incident wave is reected from the end wall
boundary. Performance of the articial damping zone with 1
and 2 is shown in Fig. 3 in which the length and width of the
tank is 4 and , respectively.
It shows that the height of wave crest is reduced when the wave
is progressing within the damping zone. A snap-shot of vertical and
horizontal velocity of the water particles u; v is given in Fig. 4 and
compared with the analytical results at t 6:0 s and x 2:6 m.
It shows that the numerical solutions and the analytical results
appropriately match. To test the numerical stability and accuracy
of NWTs, uid volume V , momentum M and energy conservation E have been usually evaluated for different mesh sizes.

Damping Zone

z/d

z/d

Fig. 3. Spatial series of wave amplitude reduction in time progress ( t  t 0 , t 0 reference time of measurement).

uT/H

vT/H

Fig. 4. A snap-shot of section of horizontal and vertical particle velocity.

83

M(t)-M(0)]10E+3

[V(t)-V(0)]10E+4

A. Abbasnia, M. Ghiasi / Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements 58 (2015) 7985

t (s)

t (s)

Time history of the momentum conservation

E(t)-E(0)]10E+4

Time history of the mass conservation

t (s)

Time history of the energy conservation

Fig. 5. Effect of mesh sizes on change of the mass, momentum and energy conservation. Time history of the mass conservation, Time history of the momentum conservation,
Time history of the energy conservation.

Fig. 6. Comparison of propagation the steep incident wave.

These values are dened as [13]

Z
Z
d
dx
V t  V 0

M t

dV

dt

Z
SI SF

SF

d
n

20

21

Z
Z
Z
1
1

1
d g 2 dx
Et  0 gz U d
2
2 SI SF n
2

SF
22
For different mesh sizes, these parameters are determined and
given in Fig. 5. To check the accuracy of BEM and MEL approach,
evaluation of the mass conservation is essential. It shows that the
change of uid volume and momentum are more uctuating with
respect to time when the mesh size becomes coarse. To examine
the NWT for modelling of the free surface nonlinearity, a steep
wave is chosen with K 0:033 to propagate within NWT. Ning

and Teng [12] developed a NWT to solve the wave propagation of

the incident wave. The solution of the present NWT is compared
with the numerical computations and the analytical result as
shown in Fig. 6. It shows that the present solution of the steep
wave propagation is in good agreement with the prior numerical
solution and analytical solution.
To reduce the wave amplitude along the tank, a uniform
array of truncated ten barriers is arranged in the length of the
tank which is extended on whole width of the tank. All barriers
have the same cross-section with d 0:5d and the half-beam
a 0:1416d which is the same as the radius of array cylinders of
Wang et al. [16] and Ma et al. [10]. Distance between the centre
of barriers group and the wave maker is chosen as 10 d. Based
on the linear theory of Maniar and Newman [11], the trapped
mode is dened for array of 101 cylinders
p in the open sea
condition when KLcy =2 1:390706 or d=g 2:2159. Hence,
the cylinders near the centre of array experienced very large
hydrodynamics force. Also, for array of ten cylinders with the

84

A. Abbasnia, M. Ghiasi / Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements 58 (2015) 7985

Barrier 1

t/T
Barrier 5

t/T
Barrier 10

t/T

Fig. 7. Time history of dimensionless horizontal force ( 2F x =a2 H) on the array of barriers for different tank width (circular point: W 10a; Dash line: W 5a),
g 9:81.

Fig. 8. Spatial series of wave elevation along array of barriers.

spacing Lcy 4a,

this phenomenon occured when KLcy =2
p
1:346352 or d=g 2:1804. It is assumed that the barriers
array conguration has the same properties of cylinder array.
For numerical computation, the grid size in the length of tank is
chosen x =30 and the time step is taken as t T=40. In this
paper, three dimensional numerical wave tank with length of
L 18d and width of W 5a and 10a is considered. The damping
zone is located on the free surface in front of the end wall tank
with length Ld 2:6433d. For different width of the tank W 5a
and 10a, the horizontal hydrodynamics force F x on the rst,
fth and tenth barriers are determined and shown in Fig. 7. It
shows that the magnitude of the force on the barrier 1 is almost
the same for both width of the tank. While the magnitude of the
force decreases along the tank and the difference of force
magnitude for W 10a and 5aincreases along the tank. It can
be seen that width of the tank causes substantial devitation of
solutions and it alters the open sea condition trapped mode as
mentioned by Wang and Wu [17] for array of ten cylinders in the
restricted water.
There is no experimental data and numerical solution to
compare the present results in this case study. The wave transmision within the group of barriers is shown in Fig. 8 in the tank with
width of W 10a at a snap-shot at t 39:92 s. It shows that there
is signicant water level difference on the foreside and rear side
barriers near the middle of barriers array at this time step. The
signicant difference of the wave amplitude is an expected
behaviour for near trapped mode (resonance) condition. This is
similar to trapped mode problem of the array of cylinders reported
by Wang and Wu. When the nonlinearity is severed, the trapped
mode frequency might be slightly changed.

5. Conclusions
A fully nonlinear three dimensional numerical wave tank based
on BEM and MEL is developed to investigate the interactions
between an array of truncated barriers and the second order wave.
The isoparametric bilinear boundary element method coupled with
the MEL approach is used to simulate the instantaneous free surface.
Double node and triple node approaches are applied in intersection
of the boundaries. High order fourth order RungeKutta time
integration is employed to update the free surface. To prevent the
numerical instabilities during the simulation, smoothing scheme is
deployed at every few time steps. The present numerical procedure is
examined with the analytical solution. Dissipation of the incident
wave in wave absorber is shown. Accuracy and convergence of the
numerical solution is also addressed. Propagation problem of the
steep wave is solved to examine the free surface nonlinearity.
Conguration of barriers group is chosen near the open sea trapped
mode. For different widths of the tank, wave transmission within the
barriers is evaluated. It is shown that the different restriction
conditions could change the trapped mode and the ow eld around
the bodies.
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