Calculation of shallow water flows using a Cartesian cut cell approach

A new grid generation method for the computation of shallow water flows is presented. The procedure, based on the use of cut cells on a Cartesian background mesh, can cope with shallow water problems having arbitrarily complex geometries. Although the method provides a fully boundary-fitted capability, no mesh generation in the conventional sense is required. Solid regions are simply cut out of a background Cartesian mesh with their boundaries represented by different types of cut cell. For the flow calculations a multi-dimensional high resolution upwind finite volume scheme is used in conjunction with an efficient approximate Riemann solver to deal with complex shallow water problems involving steady or unsteady hydraulic discontinuities. The method is validated for several test problems involving unsteady shallow water flows. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.