Analysis of the artificial viscosity in the smoothed particle hydrodynamics modelling of regular waves

This paper considers the effect of artificial viscosity in smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) computations of six different regular waves. The purpose is to improve the modelling of physically real effects and thereby make SPH a more attractive modelling option. The essence of the proposed method is to avoid running the simulation with different values of the empirical coefficient used in artificial viscosity in order to find the optimum value of this parameter for a given problem. Thorough calibration of the SPH’s numerical parameters is performed through the comparison between numerical and experimental data. Among the various parameters involved, the smoothing length and the particle resolution are mportant in shaping the results. The analysis onfirms that when the ratio of particle spacing to smoothing length and the particle resolution useful for different computational domains have been defined, the empirical coefficient depends only on the type of wave breaking in term of the Irribarren number.