A hybridized discontinuous Galerkin method for nonlinear dispersive water waves

Simulation of water waves near the coast is an important problem in different branches of engineering and mathematics. For mathematical models to be valid in this region, they should include nonlinear and dispersive properties of the corresponding waves. Here, we study the numerical solution to three equations for modeling coastal water waves using the hybridized discontinuous Galerkin method (HDG). HDG is known to be a more efficient and in certain cases a more accurate alternative to some other discontinuous Galerkin methods, such as local DG. The first equation that we solve here is the Korteweg-de Vries equation. Similar to common HDG implementations, we first express the approximate variables and numerical fluxes in each element in terms of the approximate traces of the scalar variable, and its first derivative. These traces are assumed to be single-valued on each face. We next impose the conservation of the numerical fluxes via two sets of equations on the element boundaries. We solve this equation by Newton-Raphson method. We prove the stability of the proposed method for a proper choice of stabilization parameters. Through numerical examples, we observe that for a mesh with kth order elements, the computed variable and its first and second derivatives show optimal convergence at order k + 1 in both linear and nonlinear cases, which improves upon previously employed techniques. Next, we consider solving the fully nonlinear irrotational Green-Naghdi equation. This equation is often used to simulate water waves close to the shore, where there are significant dispersive and nonlinear effects involved. To solve this equation, we use an operator splitting method to decompose the problem into a dispersive part and a hyperbolic part. The dispersive part involves an implicit step, which has regularizing effects on the solution of the problem. On the other hand, for the hyperbolic sub-problem, we use an explicit hybridized DG method. Unlike the more common implicit version of the HDG, here we start by solving the flux conservation condition for the numerical traces. Afterwards, we use these traces in the original PDEs to obtain the internal unknowns. This process involves Newton iterations at each time step for computing the numerical traces. Next, we couple this solver with the dispersive solver to obtain the solution to the Green-Naghdi equation. We then solve a set of numerical examples to verify and validate the employed technique. In the first example we show the convergence properties of the numerical method. Next, we compare our results with a set of experimental data for nonlinear water waves in different situations. We observe close to optimal convergence rates and a good agreement between our numerical results and the experimental data.