Effects of Slide Shape on Impulse Waves Generated by a Subaerial Solid Slide

Abstract

We review several historical landslide tsunami events and perform a set of numerical experiments to investigate the particular effects of slide shape on impulsive waves generated by a subaerial solid slide. The computational model is based on OpenFOAM, which solves 2D RANS formulations with a volume of fluid method used to capture the air–water interface. We consider triangular prism shaped solid slides in our numerical experiments and introduce a slide shape parameter σ to describe the front face steepness of the slide. Observations from the experiments reveal that slide shape can have significant impacts on the characteristics of impulsive waves, such as maximum wave amplitude and its location, impact energy conversion rate, and the amplitude ratio between the first wave crest and the second crest in the leading wave group. In particular, the maximum wave amplitude is inversely proportional to σ; the impact energy conversion ratio decays exponentially with σ; and the wave period is almost independent of σ.