A stabilised nodal spectral element method for fully nonlinear water waves

We present a new stabilised and efficient high-order nodal spectral element method based on the Mixed Eulerian Lagrangian (MEL) method for general-purpose simulation of fully nonlinear water waves and wave-body interactions. In this MEL formulation a standard Laplace formulation is used to handle arbitrary body shapes using unstructured - possibly hybrid - meshes consisting of high-order curvilinear iso-parametric quadrilateral/triangular elements to represent the body surfaces and for the evolving free surface. Importantly, our numerical analysis highlights that a single top layer of quadrilaterals elements resolves temporal instabilities in the numerical MEL scheme that are known to be associated with mesh topology containing asymmetric element orderings. The 'surface variable only' free surface formulation based on introducing a particle-following (Lagrangian) reference frame contains quartic nonlinear terms that require proper treatment by numerical discretisation due to the possibility of strong aliasing effects. We demonstrate how to stabilise this nonlinear MEL scheme using an efficient combination of (i) global L2 projection without quadrature errors, (ii) mild nonlinear spectral filtering and (iii) re-meshing techniques. Numerical experiments revisiting known benchmarks are presented, and highlights that modelling using a high-order spectral element method provides excellent accuracy in prediction of nonlinear and dispersive wave propagation, and of nonlinear wave-induced loads on fixed submerged and surface-piercing bodies.