A numerical wave-maker for internal solitary waves with timely updated mass source/sink terms

On the basis of the two-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations, a new numerical method is proposed to generate internal solitary waves (ISWs) of expected parameters by adding a source term above the interface and a sink term below the interface into the continuity equation. Fluxes between the source and the sink are balanced to assure mass conservation, and the source/sink regions (the spatial windows over which the sink/source terms are placed) are adjusted as functions of time with the interface motion. Thus, the nonphysical trailing waves can be eliminated, which makes it easy to assure the prescribed ISW parameters. Moreover, a new layout is presented to avoid the difficulty of sizing and positioning the source/sink region, which has been proved to be an intrinsic drawback of the traditional mass source method. Numerical experiments are performed to validate the proposed method by analyzing the wave displacements and vertical profiles of velocity fields. It is shown that the numerical waveform remains stable with much less trailing waves than previous methods, and the numerical results are in good agreement with theoretical and experimental results. In addition, through sensitivity analysis, a reasonable method to determine the width of source/sink region is recommended. (C) 2017 Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.