Numerical simulations of wave sheltering in coastal waters with submerged tensioned viscoelastic sheets using smoothed particle hydrodynamics

• Main Authors: Liu, Xiaodong, Law, Adrian Wing-Keung, Sree, Dharma K. K., Bi, Cheng
• Other Authors: School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2024
• Subjects: Engineering; Wave sheltering; Tensioned viscoelastic sheets
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/176067
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The installation of submerged tensioned viscoelastic sheets in both vertical and horizontal configurations has been proposed as a soft measure for wave sheltering in coastal waters. In this study, we develop a novel numerical scheme to model wave sheltering performance of the tensioned viscoelastic sheet using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) by discretising the sheet into finite rigid sections interconnected through rotational hinges, with each rotational hinge being assigned with appropriate torsional stiffness and damping to emulate the viscoelastic behaviour of the sheet. Furthermore, a spring hinge is added to the two ends of the sheet to represent the stretching deformation and pre-tensioning. The SPH approach is validated against the experimental measurements on wave interactions with vertical tensioned viscoelastic sheets by Bi (2022) and horizontal tensioned viscoelastic sheets by Sree et al. (2021). The simulation results reasonably predict the sheet displacement under wave action in both experiments with varying sheet property, wave period and pre-tension. The wave sheltering performance in both experiments is also predicted satisfactorily. Nevertheless, for the horizontal viscoelastic sheet, the SPH simulations underestimate the sheet displacement with deep submergence and are also unable to generate the nonlinear high-frequency wave components with shallow submergence due to inherent limitations of the current SPH model.