SPH Modelling at IESVic

Shahab Yeylaghi

My name is Shahab Yeylaghi and I am a researcher at the Mechanical Engineering Department and Institute for Integrated Energy Systems (IESVic) at the University of Victoria. My research deals with modeling of fluid-structure interactions.

For my research, I developed an in-house 3D parallel code based on a Lagrangian mesh-less numerical method called SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics). SPH originally developed to study astrophysics but has been applied for hydrodynamic applications due to its charecteristics in the last two decades. Here, I present some of the projects that I simulated by using SPH.

Shahab Yeylaghi
Shahab Yeylaghi (PhD Candidate)

Curran Crawford
Curran Crawford (Supervisor)

Curran Crawford
Peter Oshkai (Supervisor)

Curran Crawford
Belaid Moa (Compute Canada, WestGrid)

Yeylaghi, Shahab, Curran Crawford, Peter Oshkai, and Bradley Buckham. "A Comparison of SPH and RANS Models for Simulation of Wave Overtopping", International Conference on Ocean Energy (ICOE) 2014, Halifax, Canada.

Yeylaghi, Shahab, Belaid Moa, Bradley Buckham, Peter Oshkai, Scott Beatty, and Curran Crawford. "SPH Modeling of Hydrodynamic Loads on a Point Absorber Wave Energy Converter Hull", 11th European Wave and Tidal Energy Conference (EWTEC) 2015, Nantes, France.

Yeylaghi, Shahab, Belaid Moa, Peter Oshkai, Bradley Buckham, and Curran Crawford. "ISPH modelling of an oscillating wave surge converter using an OpenMP-based parallel approach." Journal of Ocean Engineering and Marine Energy (2016): 1-12.

Yeylaghi, Shahab, Belaid Moa, Peter Oshkai, Bradley Buckham, and Curran Crawford. "ISPH modelling for hydrodynamic applications using a new MPI-based parallel approach", Journal of Ocean Engineering and Marine Energy (2016), accepted.

Yeylaghi, Shahab, Belaid Moa, Bradley Buckham, Peter Oshkai, Jose Vasquez, Ken Christison, Curran Crawford, "ISPH modelling of landslide generated waves for rigid and deformable slides in Newtonian and Non-Newtonian reservoir fluid", submitted to Journal of Advances in Water Resources.

Shahab Yeylaghi
Shahab Yeylaghi

Email: shahaby at uvic dot ca



One of the main applications of SPH is tsunami modeling and dam-break problems. The current parallel turbulent code has the ability of including any geometry (e.g a map of certain location in a town) and perform the analysis of a tsunami wave on the structures.
In the following video a dam breaks on three stuctures are simulated using ISPH method. Particles are colored by their velocity magnitude.

Wave Energy Converters (WECs) were invented to convert the wave energy into electricity. Offshore devices, such as WECs, experience continuous transient loads from ocean waves and currents. In addition to the transient loads, the wave-structure interaction includes complex phenomena, such as slamming and turbulence. A nonlinear numerical simulation method is therefore required to better understand the wave-structure interaction.

Incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (ISPH) method is used to calculate hydrodynamic forces on the Oscillating Wave Surge Converters (OWSC). In the following video the flap WEC is shown under an approching wave. Particles are colored by their pressures in the following videos.

Top view



Side view

Landslide generated waves are simulated by using the turbulent parallel 3D ISPH code. The code has the capability of modeling both rigid and deformable slides in both 2D and 3D. more videos are comming soon ...

Scott Russell Wave Generator



Rigid body slides into a tank in 2D



Rigid body slides into a tank in 3D



Deformable slide

more videos are coming soon ...

Blue particles are water particles and red particles are sediment particles used for the next video Blue particles are water particles and red particles are sediment particles used for the next video

Scour in a channel around a square bridge pier. The water velocity is 1 m/s, the still water height is 0.3 m and the sediment depth is 0.2 m. In this video only the sediment particles (red particles in the above figure) are colored with (z - 0.2), z is the vertical direction.

Scour due to dam break. Water particles are colored blue and sediment particles are colored white.



Water flow over 3 square bridge piers in a channel. Particles are colored by their velocity magnitude, inlet velocity is 1m/s



Water flow over 3 square bridge piers in a channel. Inlet particles (blue) propagating in to the domain



Water flow over 3 square bridge piers in a channel. Velocity vectors close to the floor, inlet velocity is 1m/s