Capturing vertical information in radially symmetric flow using hyperbolic shallow water moment equations

Abstract

Models for shallow water flow often assume that the lateral velocity is constant over the water height. The recently derived shallow water moment equations are an extension of these standard shallow water equations. The extended models allow for vertical changes in the lateral velocity, resulting in a system that is more accurate in situations where the horizontal velocity varies considerably over the height of the fluid. Unfortunately, already the one-dimensional models lack global hyperbolicity, an important property of partial differential equations that ensures that disturbances have a finite propagation speed. In this paper we show that the loss of hyperbolicity also occurs in two-dimensional axisymmetric systems. First, a cylindrical moment model is obtained by starting from the cylindrical incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. We derive two-dimensional axisymmetric Shallow Water Moment Equations by imposing axisymmetry in the cylindrical model. The loss of hyperbolicity is observed by directly evaluating the propagation speeds and plotting the hyperbolicity region. A hyperbolic axisymmetric moment model is then obtained by modifying the system matrix in analogy to the one-dimensional case, for which the hyperbolicity problem has already been observed and overcome. The new model is written in analytical form and we prove that hyperbolicity can be guaranteed. To test the new model, numerical simulations with both discontinuous and continuous initial data are performed. We show that the hyperbolic model leads to less oscillations than the non-hyperbolic model in the case of a discontinuous initial height profile. The hyperbolic model is preferred over the non-hyperbolic model in this specific scenario for shorter times. Further, we observe that the error decreases when the order of the model is increased in a test case with smooth initial data.