Ph.D. Position - Simulation of wetting and drying processes with X-MESH

Offer Description

Under the influence of tides and storm surges, estuaries and coastal regions exhibit zones that are alternatively covered by water and exposed to the atmosphere, giving rise to specific ecosystems. Numerically simulating in a realistic manner the flooding and drying of these zones has been a difficult issue since the inception of the first models of shallow water areas [RB68]. Many methods have been designed [Bal98], which belong to four categories, i.e., thin film, element removal, extrapolation and negative depth algorithms [1, 2]. The computer efficiency is, among others, a critical factor: for the same domain, namely the Scheldt Estuary (Belgium, Netherlands), the method of Karna et al. [3] was more than one order of magnitude faster than that of Gourgue et al. [4] while producing rather similar hydrodynamic results. None of the algorithms introduced up until now has all of the following features: computer efficiency, conservation of the water volume and mass of dissolved or particulate matter, sharpness of the interface between wet and dry areas, and accurate representation of the motion of this interface, which can be assessed by having recourse to field data and relevant test cases. The challenge is thus to develop a novel algorithm possessing all of the aforementioned qualities. It should be implicit, sharp and mass conservative.

[1] S.C. Medeiros and S.C. Hagen. Review of wetting and drying algorithms for numerical tidal flow models. International journal for numerical methods in fluids, 71(4):473–487, 2013.

[2] A.S. Candy. An implicit wetting and drying approach for non-hydrostatic baroclinic flows in high aspect ratio domains. Advances in Water Resources, 102:188–205, 2017.

[3] T. Karna, B. De Brye, O. Gourgue, J. Lambrechts, R. Comblen, V. Legat, and E. Deleersnijder. A fully implicit wetting–drying method for dg-fem shallow water models, with an application to the scheldt estuary. Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, 200(5- 8):509–524, 2011.

[4] O. Gourgue, R. Comblen, J. Lambrechts, T. Karna, V. Legat, and E. Deleersnijder. A flux- limiting wetting–drying method for finite-element shallow-water models, with application to the scheldt estuary. Advances in Water Resources, 32(12):1726–1739, 2009.

Requirements

Research Field

Engineering » Mechanical engineering

Education Level

Master Degree or equivalent

Skills/Qualifications

The successful candidate will have a good knowledge of fluid mechanics, knowledge of environmental fluids is a plus. He/she will have been educated in numerical methods in fluid mechanics, the finite element method in particular.

Specific Requirements

Good programming skills are required (C/C++/Python)

Languages

ENGLISH

Level

Good