Selection of a Turbulence Model for Wave Evolution on a New Ecological Hollow Cube

A suitable turbulence model is needed for numerical simulations to accurately simulate the wave evolution and hydrodynamic performance of the new ecological hollow cube. The new ecological hollow cube is an improvement upon traditional designs, as it can grow plants to dissipate wave energy. In this study, the open-source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software OpenFOAM v2206 is used as the computational platform to analyze and evaluate the numerical results of four turbulence models, i.e., the standard k-ε, steady k-ω shear stress transfer (SST), buoyancy-corrected k-ω SST, and large eddy simulation (LES) models, by using three mesh systems (with grid counts of 0.89, 2.92, and 8.91 million grids, respectively). Comparison of the numerical results from the four turbulence models reveals that the stabilized k-ω SST turbulence model provides better results for simulating the complex wave evolution process on the cube and effectively captures the wave free surface. In contrast, the other models exhibit a greater grid dependency. The stabilized k-ω SST model more accurately captures the wave run-up and reflection coefficient better than other turbulence models do. Therefore, the stabilized k-ω SST model is selected as the most suitable turbulence model for hydrodynamic modeling of the new ecological hollow cube.