A Comparison between Finite Element and Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics’ Simulations of Dam Break

Modeling of free surface flows is one of the main challenges in computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Dam break, as a free surface flow producer, is very important in industrial and environmental works and is usually applied to evaluate the performance of numerical modeling methods. In a dam break, because of a sudden break of a holding barrier, a large amount of water is accidentally released downstream. In this study, two numerical models for solving the dam break problem are developed and the efficiency of them is compared together. In the first model, Navier-Stokes equations for incompressible fluid are solved using a Characteristic-Based Split (CBS) finite element method on an unstructured triangular grid. The second numerical model solves the aforementioned equations with a meshless method entitled as Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method. The results show that the developed SPH model provides better efficiency and accuracy than the CBS finite element method.