A coupled model of submerged vegetation under oscillatory flow using Navier-Stokes equations

This work presents a new model for wave and submerged vegetation which couples the flow motion with the plant deformation. The IH-2VOF model is extended to solve the Reynolds Average Navier-Stokes equations including the presence of a vegetation field by means of a drag force. Turbulence is modeled using a k-epsilon equation which takes into account the effect of vegetation by an approximation of dispersive fluxes using the drag force produce by the plant. The plant motion is solved accounting for inertia, damping, restoring, gravitational, Froude-Krylov and hydrodynamic mass forces. The resulting model is validated with small and large-scale experiments with a high degree of accuracy for both no swaying and swaying plants. Two new formulations of the drag coefficient are provided extending the range of applicability of existing formulae to lower Reynolds number. (C) 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V.