[Buxxy]

Dear CFD-online community,


I'm a master student working in Windows on a project about water visualization. I'm not someone who usually asks questions, but the amount of available software and the complexity of this software and computational fluid dynamics in general are overwhelming me a bit. I've already spent a few days looking through software APIs, trying to figure out what they can and can not do.

Let me explain. I have a very simple test case in mind: I want to simulate water flow around buildings (imagine a flooded town) and analyze the structure of the waves to come up with a simple phenomenological model. I want to have various test cases in which I vary the depth around the buildings, the flow speed and the buildings themselves (they will be constant for a single test case).

I have a two questions. First of all, I could not find any research on this specific topic. I have a feeling I'm looking in the wrong places.. Does anyone know of research in this specific direction?

Secondly, in order to get a simulation set up, I have to find software that can do this for me (or maybe even program it myself?). Doing a full 3D simulation would probably kill the simulation speed. From what I know, I am looking for a shallow water solver. Do you have any recommendations?

I have looked at OpenFOAM, whose shallow water solver apparently isn't suitable for my case (see here). I have also looked at SU2 and asked a question on their forum, but got no response as of yet (see here). Sure, I could install Linux and use one of these packages to create my own solver, but a lot of time would go into that. There has to be something!

Thanks in advance,
Selmar

tl;dr
- research analyzing water flow / wave structure around buildings?
- shallow water simulation software with output suitable for analysis?