Simulating dam-break flooding with floating objects through intricate city layouts using GPU-based SPH method

For the fast transient dam break flooding with floating bodies presented through intricate city layouts, the traditional grid-based method based on solving two dimensional (2D) Shallow Water Equations or three dimensional (3D) Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations have difficulty in modelling the 3D unsteady flow features and the moving objects in the flow, causing inaccuracies. In this paper, the fully Lagrangian meshfree Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method with the graphical processing unit parallel computing technique employed (GPUSPH) is therefore applied to simulate the dam-break flood through the intricate urban district and to implement floating objects in the flow. Taking advantage of GPUs parallel computing techniques, simulations involving millions of particles (computational nodes) can be achieved. Numerical results identify the complex 3D flow features, such as hydraulic jumps, wave vortices and flow discontinuities, which indicates SPH method is well-suited for the modeling of dam-break flood through urban areas and the complicated flooding flow involving fluids with interacting floating objects.