Discontinuous Galerkin spectral/hp element modelling of dispersive shallow water systems

Two-dimensional shallow water systems are frequently used in engineering practice to model environmental flows. The benefit of these systems are that, by integration over the water depth, a two-dimensional system is obtained which approximates the full three-dimensional problem. Nevertheless, for most applications the need to propagate waves over many wavelengths means that the numerical solution of these equations remains particularly challenging. The requirement for an accurate discretization in geometrically complex domains makes the use of spectral/hp elements attractive. However, to allow for the possibility of discontinuous solutions the most natural formulation of the system is within a discontinuous Galerkin (DG) framework. In this paper we consider the unstructured spectral/hp DG formulation of (i) weakly nonlinear dispersive Boussinesq equations and (ii) nonlinear shallow water equations (a subset of the Boussinesq equations). Discretization of the Boussinesq equations involves resolving third order mixed derivatives. To efficiently handle these high order terms a new scalar formulation based on the divergence of the momentum equations is presented. Numerical computations illustrate the exponential convergence with regard to expansion order and finally, we simulate solitary wave solutions.