Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

FullSWOF: A free software package for the simulation of shallow water flows

Olivier Delestre, Frédéric Darboux, Francois James, Carine Lucas, Christian Laguerre, Stephane Cordier

TL;DR

FullSWOF delivers a reproducible, open-source solver for overland shallow-water flows by combining well-balanced finite-volume methods with a modular friction and infiltration framework. The paper details the governing Saint-Venant equations, their 1D and 2D forms, and source-term treatments (topography, rainfall, infiltration, friction) alongside hydrostatic reconstruction and semi-implicit friction schemes to preserve equilibria. It validates the approach against classical analytic solutions and real datasets (lake at rest, dam break, Thacker's 2D, MacDonald-type solutions, and Malpasset) and demonstrates applicability to hydrology-driven scenarios, including rainfall-runoff and complex terrains. The work emphasizes reproducibility, open-source availability (CeCILL-V2), and extensible architecture, enabling community contributions and parallel computation for large-scale problems.

Abstract

Numerical simulations of flows are required for numerous applications, and are usually carried out using shallow water equations. We describe the FullSWOF software which is based on up-to-date finite volume methods and well-balanced schemes to solve this kind of equations. It consists of a set of open source C++ codes, freely available to the community, easy to use, and open for further development. Several features make FullSWOF particularly suitable for applications in hydrology: small water heights and wet-dry transitions are robustly handled, rainfall and infiltration are incorporated, and data from grid-based digital topographies can be used directly. A detailed mathematical description is given here, and the capabilities of FullSWOF are illustrated based on analytic solutions and datasets of real cases. The codes, available in 1D and 2D versions, have been validated on a large set of benchmark cases, which are available together with the download information and documentation at http://www.univ-orleans.fr/mapmo/soft/FullSWOF/.

FullSWOF: A free software package for the simulation of shallow water flows

TL;DR

FullSWOF delivers a reproducible, open-source solver for overland shallow-water flows by combining well-balanced finite-volume methods with a modular friction and infiltration framework. The paper details the governing Saint-Venant equations, their 1D and 2D forms, and source-term treatments (topography, rainfall, infiltration, friction) alongside hydrostatic reconstruction and semi-implicit friction schemes to preserve equilibria. It validates the approach against classical analytic solutions and real datasets (lake at rest, dam break, Thacker's 2D, MacDonald-type solutions, and Malpasset) and demonstrates applicability to hydrology-driven scenarios, including rainfall-runoff and complex terrains. The work emphasizes reproducibility, open-source availability (CeCILL-V2), and extensible architecture, enabling community contributions and parallel computation for large-scale problems.

Abstract

Numerical simulations of flows are required for numerous applications, and are usually carried out using shallow water equations. We describe the FullSWOF software which is based on up-to-date finite volume methods and well-balanced schemes to solve this kind of equations. It consists of a set of open source C++ codes, freely available to the community, easy to use, and open for further development. Several features make FullSWOF particularly suitable for applications in hydrology: small water heights and wet-dry transitions are robustly handled, rainfall and infiltration are incorporated, and data from grid-based digital topographies can be used directly. A detailed mathematical description is given here, and the capabilities of FullSWOF are illustrated based on analytic solutions and datasets of real cases. The codes, available in 1D and 2D versions, have been validated on a large set of benchmark cases, which are available together with the download information and documentation at http://www.univ-orleans.fr/mapmo/soft/FullSWOF/.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 33 sections, 42 equations, 12 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Keywords :
  2. Introduction
  3. Model: Shallow-Water Equations
  4. General Settings
  5. Friction Terms
  6. Infiltration Model
  7. Properties
  8. One-Dimensional Model
  9. Source Terms and Equilibria
  10. Two-Dimensional Model
  11. Numerical Methods
  12. General Settings
  13. Convective Step for the One-Dimensional Model
  14. Source Terms
  15. The Hydrostatic Reconstruction
  16. ...and 18 more sections

Figures (12)

  • Figure 1: Notations for 2D shallow-water equations.
  • Figure 2: Notations for the Green-Ampt infiltration model.
  • Figure 3: Discretization of time and space in FullSWOF.
  • Figure 4: Lake at rest with an emerged bump: comparison of the analytic solution with the FullSWOF_1D results. Simulation with 500 cells at T = 100 s.
  • Figure 5: Dam break on a dry domain without friction: comparison of the analytic solution with the FullSWOF_1D results. Simulation with 500 cells at T = 6 s.
  • ...and 7 more figures