Lattice Boltzmann Method for Simulating Impulsive Water Waves Generated by Landslides

Impulsive water waves generated by landslides impose severe damages on coastal areas. Very large mass flows in the ocean can generate catastrophic tsunamis. Preventing damages to dams and coastal structures and saving lives of local people against landslide-generated waves have become increasingly important in recent years. Numerical modeling of landslide-generated waves is a challenging subject in CFD. The reason lies in difficulty of determining the interactions between the moving solids and sea water that causes complicated turbulent regimes around the moving mass and at the water surface. Submarine or aerial types of landslide can further complicate the problem. Up to now a number of numerical approaches have been proposed for predicting the behavior of flow during and after the mass movement. In this study a Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) based-code is employed for analyzing and simulating the impulsive water waves generated by landslides. Four experimental cases of submerged and aerial landslides have been modeled to investigate the efficiency and accuracy of the LBM code, and the obtained results are verified against experimental observations. The results indicate the capability of LBM in simulating complicated flow fields and demonstrate its superiority over numerical methods that have been used so far such as SPH and RANS.