A 2D fully nonlinear wave-current numerical wave tank (NWT) based on BEM is investigated. In this paper, a new approach, a total velocity potential function is adopted to solve a wave-current interaction problem; meanwhile, the fully nonlinear free surface boundary condition is treated by using Mixed Eulerian-Lagrangian method (MEL). A linear and a high order wave-current theories are used as a feeding function separately to generate waves from input boundary, and assume the uniform current has existed in the wave tank before waves are generated. To dissipate the wave energy at the end of wall, a numerical damping zone is modified and deployed at the tank-end. A boundary element method with linear element scheme and the Runge- Kutta 4th order method are used to predict the water surface elevation varied with time. The simulated results show well agreement with other solutions in deep water as well as in intermediate water depths.
It is one of interesting topics of ocean engineering to precisely comprehend the nonlinear properties of wave-current interaction due to the fact that waves always propagate with currents in the real open sea. Moreover, the interactions of wave-current are hard to study in hydrodynamic laboratory due to difficultly generating fully uniform steady current with waves in the tank. Therefore, developing a fully nonlinear wave-current NWT to investigate the properties of wave-current interaction is an important issue. Over the last two decades, numerical solution of the exact nonlinear equations for the inviscid water waves using a boundary integral equation description has become an extremely successful scheme (Cointe, 1990; Grilli and Svendsen, 1990; Kim et al., 1999; Tanizawa, 2000). Although there are many papers dealing with fully nonlinear waves by NWT, researches on fully nonlinear wave-current interactions are still rare.
