3D numerical simulation of seagrass movement under waves and currents with GPUSPH

The current study tries a new approach to simulating interactions between waves and seagrass through Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH). In this model, the plants are defined as a solid that respects Hooke's law, and are assumed to have direct interaction with the fluid. Given the characteristics of the SPH method, especially in terms of computational time, the dimensions of the simulations were limited. The first goal of the current study was to optimize the approach to avoid reaching certain limits such as the rupture of the simulated plant. Plant movements under waves and/or currents have been studied by several authors in various in-situ, physical, and numerical experiments concerning various vegetation species, thus proving that plant movements can be successfully reproduced by SPH 2D/3D. Manning's roughness coefficient, n, was calculated to confirm that the results were in accordance with what had been measured in flume studies. Even though there is still room for improvement, it is shown that this method can be used to estimate Manning's coefficient for coastal vegetation (seagrass and saltmarsh vegetation) and to greatly improve the modeling and forecasting of coastal erosion and storm surge risks by including the effects of vegetation in integrated models. (c) 2020 International Research and Training Centre on Erosion and Sedimentation/the World Association for Sedimentation and Erosion Research. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The study explores simulating interactions between waves and seagrass using SPH, optimizing the method to avoid simulated plant rupture.