Three-Dimensional Numerical Modeling of Dam Break Flow Over an Obstacle by Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Method

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is an efficient meshless method that displays a Lagrangian view of the problems. This method is one of the best schemes for modeling the problems that exhibit large shape deformations and the complicated free surfaces in fluid mechanics. Dam break phenomenon is considered one example of this type of problem. In the present article, the fundamentals of the smoothed particle hydrodynamics is described and subsequently the three dimensional modeling of the dam break problem is presented. The computational findings are compared against experimental data. The generated free surface profiles by the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method displays favorable agreement with the experimental results. In order to implement the SPH method, two different algorithms of Verlet and Predictor-Corrector were used. Comparisons indicated that the predictor-corrector algorithm displays much better accuracy that the Verlet algorithm, albeit with much higher computational cost.