Back to results

Virginia Tech

High-Fidelity Numerical Simulation of Shallow Water Waves

Abstract

dc:description.abstract

Tsunamis impose significant threat to human life and coastal infrastructure. The goal of my dissertation is to develop a robust, accurate, and computationally efficient numerical model for quantitative hazard assessment of tsunamis. The length scale of the physical domain of interest ranges from hundreds of kilometers, in the case of landslide-generated tsunamis, to thousands of kilometers, in the case of far-field tsunamis, while the water depth varies from couple of kilometers, in deep ocean, to few centimeters, in the vicinity of shoreline. The large multi-scale computational domain leads to challenging and expensive numerical simulations. I present and compare the numerical results for different important problems --- such as tsunami hazard mitigation due to presence of coastal vegetation, boulder dislodgement and displacement by long waves, and tsunamis generated by an asteroid impact --- in risk assessment of tsunamis. I employ depth-integrated shallow water equations and Serre-Green-Naghdi equations for solving the problems and compare them to available three-dimensional results obtained by mesh-free smoothed particle hydrodynamics and volume of fluid methods. My results suggest that depth-integrated equations, given the current hardware computational capacities and the large scales of the problems in hand, can produce results as accurate as three-dimensional schemes while being computationally more efficient by at least an order of a magnitude.

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Ph. D.
Level thesis:degree_level
doctoral
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Geosciences
Department dc:contributor.department
Geosciences
Grantor dc:publisher
Virginia Tech
Year dc:date.issued
2016

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Zainali, Amir
Chair dc:contributor.committeechair
  • Weiss, Robert
Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember
  • Irish, Jennifer L.
  • Xiao, Heng
  • Stark, Nina
  • King, Scott D.

Subjects

dc:subject × 3

Rights

dc:rights
Statement dc:rights
  • In Copyright

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Dc Identifier Other
vt_gsexam:9189
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/73653

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
Virginia Tech
Base URL
vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/oai/request
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Zainali, Amir. High-Fidelity Numerical Simulation of Shallow Water Waves. doctoral thesis, Virginia Tech, 2016. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/73653