Simulating regular wave propagation over a submerged bar by boundary element method model and Boussinesq equation model

Abstract

Numerical models based on the boundary element method and Boussinesq equation are used to simulate the wave transform over a submerged bar for regular waves. In the boundary-element-method model the linear element is used, and the integrals are computed by analytical formulas. The Boussinesq-equation model is the well-known FUNWAVE from the University of Delaware. We compare the numerical free surface displacements with the laboratory data on both gentle slope and steep slope, and find that both the models simulate the wave transform well. We further compute the agreement indexes between the numerical result and laboratory data, and the results support that the boundary-element-method model has a stable good performance, which is due to the fact that its governing equation has no restriction on nonlinearity and dispersion as compared with Boussinesq equation.