Application of the Galerkin method to the formulation of a three-dimensional nonlinear hydrodynamic numerical sea model

A mathematical formulation is presented for solving the three-dimensional nonlinear hydrodynamic equations, using the Galerkin method with an arbitrary set of basis functions.An explicit time splitting method is used to integrate these equations through time. The time splitting method is formulated in such a way that the advective terms, which are computationally expensive to evaluate, are integrated with a longer time step than the linear terms. The length of the time step used to integrate the linear terms is determined by the propagation speed of the gravity waves. The paper demonstrates that using this time splitting method an accurate and computationally economic solution of the full three-dimensional equations is possible.Numerical results are presented for the nonlinear seiche motion in a one-dimensional basin, and for the three-dimensional wind induced flow in a closed rectangular basin, using basis sets of cosine functions, Chebyshev polynomials and Gram-Schmidt orthogonalized polynomials.