Dam Break Flow Benchmarks: Quo Vadis?

1. Research content

This deposit contains the version, copy-edited before the conference, of the paper presented at the 16th International Workshop of SPHERIC, the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Research and Engineering International Community, held in Catania, Italy on 7-9 June 2022. This version contains a few edits to the copy contained in the conference proceedings and also deposited as an earlier version of this record. The high-resolution figures are also distributed as individual files; their full list is tabulated below.

This contribution can be relevant for the readers interested in any of the following topics:

1. Designing experiments of dam-break flows that optimize their duration and size and provide complete validation data;
2. Visualizing the dynamic and acoustic features of 2D turbulent flows resolvable with Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics;
3. Resolving, from within the viscous sublayer, unsteady wall-bounded flows under an adverse pressure gradient;
4. Using the spectrum of pressure probe measurements diagnostically, to track the occurence of (non-)spurious events in the fluid and to quantify the effect of density-diffusion treatments.

The paper is immediately available for reading and downloading in the default preview below. The figures can be previewed and downloaded by selecting them in the Files block further below. All files are open-access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. This work should be cited as conveniently reported in the right-hand side of this web page.

The table of contents of the paper is:

• Abstract
• I. A Benchmark for Sudden Water Arrivals
• II. Simulation Workflow
• III. Selected Simulation Results
  • A. Flow Fields
    • Boundary layer separations
    • Approaching the viscous sublayer
    • Chaotic motion
    • Notes on direct turbulence modelling
  • B. Pressure Measurements at the Wall
    • Signals in the time domain
    • Spectra in the frequency domain
    • Notes on pressure spectra as a diagnostic tool for simulations
• IV. Forward-Looking Remarks
• Acknowledgements
• References

Moreover, Section 2 below contains retrospective notes on the composition of the paper, and Section 3 lists the versions of this deposit; the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.6391457 always resolves to the latest version of the deposit and is the most convenient pointer to this work. 

List of figure files

This list provides orientation in the visual content but does not provide access. Scroll down to the Files section for previewing and downloading. 

2. Document composition: how this article is born

2.1 Content assemblage

After having had one-page summaries reviewed and ranked by anonymous peers, the organisers asked the speakers to submit a paper of maximum 8 pages, providing a two-column template for IEEE Conference Proceedings. The paper in this record has been created typesetting a LaTeX source code.

Not unusually for conferences, the deadlines catalysed advancement with respect to the proposed summary. A few findings worth of emphasis were identified while drafting the manuscript. Likewise, composing the text stimulated fresh interpretations, which required additional triaging before being promoted to highlights/insights worth proposing.

Therefore, in order to accommodate for rapid cycles of hypothesis (re)formulation, analysis, (re-)evaluation and incorporation, the first draft was arranged into the canonical sectioning for journal articles in science and technology: Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusions. These sections provided convenient bins where candidate content of varying persistence was routed into, based on its anticipated valence. This first round of composition resulted into a 12-page first draft.

2.2 Shortening

The manuscript has then been shrunk to 8 pages by interleaving several passes of a three-pronged strategy, aiming at coherence and clarity (in the content) and at a compact management of the page space (in the container).

At the level of sections and paragraphs, coherence was enhanced upon grouping consistent information into single paragraphs and signalling the internal logic with transition words. These passes also invited reshuffling the canonical sectioning, for example upon splitting the content of the Discussion into subsections for the Results. While a new structure developed organically, the section titles were renamed altogether to guide the reader directly into restricted topics, as shown in the final table of contents. All these operations made the article immediately more succinct and reduced the space taken without sacrificing the content.

At the level of sentences, clarity was firstly enhanced by simply removing text, images and table parts, whether because of their apparent redundancy or in a kill-your-darlings mode. Making use of the LaTeX way of composing documents, the old text could merely be commented out in the source code, conveniently storing old ideas for later re-use. Secondly, tightening up phrases and expressions as well as using keywords from speciality fields in lieu of paraphrases gave additional clarity and conciseness.

Finally, unnecessary empty space was removed upon arranging smaller images into panels and sharing the original-size figures separately as supplementary material in this deposit; then, upon presenting the axis quantities in the figure captions rather than in their labels; and, finally, upon moving supplementary information from the text body to the footnotes. This required some passes of editing and typesetting in order to make sure that the built-in whitespace administration of LaTeX actually produced a visually compact document.

2.3 Release

At the end of this work, the 8-page release candidate underwent a round of final checks of the co-authors', in case linguistic editing had introduced uncertain or unclear statements. This resulted into version 1.1, as published in both the proceedings and Zotero. Residual fixes and improvements --- identified with a fresh pair of eyes after several days of detachment from the document --- eventually led to version 1.2. Both versions, each with its own DOI, were uploaded ahead of the conference and embargoed until its start date. Conveniently, Zenodo also generates a special DOI that always points to the latest version of the record.

The DOI of this record was reserved upon creating an unpublished Zenodo entry while drafting the manuscript. That DOI is mentioned in the Acknowledgements of the paper to inform the viewers of the possibility to download the paper and its figures after the conference. The record's publication date is the start date of the conference.

As is often the case for publications written under the pressure of deadlines, the language could have been improved further also within the 8-page limit. Admittedly, reading some sentences still requires a conscious parsing effort, even to the authors, and slows down the flow. However, in every production, a moment comes to let go of the job with warts and all, and save the lessons learned for the next effort. We hope this study will be of some value for some readers all the same.

3. Versions of this deposit

The latest version of this record can be retrieved from the DOI 10.5281/zenodo.6391457.

Description authored by Giordano Lipari