Revisiting wind wave growth with fully-coupled direct numerical simulations

TL;DR

This study uses fully-coupled direct numerical simulations to investigate wind wave growth, revealing the importance of pressure forcing and wave steepness, and providing new insights into wave evolution and growth mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fully-coupled simulation approach that captures wave evolution and breaking without subgrid models, clarifying assumptions and reconciling previous results.

Findings

Wave energy growth aligns with pressure forcing data.

Wave form drag depends on steepness, not wave age.

Normalised growth rate agrees with prior studies.

Abstract

We investigate wind wave growth by direct numerical simulations solving for the two phase Navier-Stokes equations. We consider ratio of the wave speed $c$ to wind friction velocity $u_*$ from $c/u_*=$ 2 to 8, i.e. in the slow to intermediate wave regime; and initial wave steepness $ak$ from 0.1 to 0.3; the two being varied independently. The turbulent wind and the travelling, nearly monochromatic waves are fully coupled without any subgrid scale models. The novel fully-coupled approach captures the simultaneous evolution of the wave amplitude and shape, together with the underwater boundary layer (drift current), up to wave breaking. The wave energy growth computed from the time-dependent rms surface elevation is in quantitative agreement with that computed from the extracted surface pressure distribution, which confirms the leading role of the pressure forcing for finite amplitude gravity waves. The phase shift and the amplitude of the principal mode of surface pressure distribution are systematically reported, to provide direct evidence for possible wind wave growth theories. For the momentum and energy fluxes, we find that the wave form drag force is not a strong function of wave age but closely related to wave steepness. The time evolution of the rms steepness and the wave form drag suggests that there is an effect of the history of wind wave coupling. The normalised wave growth rate we obtain agrees with previous experimental and numerical studies. We make an effort to clarify various commonly-adopted underlying assumptions, and to reconcile the scattering of the data between different previous theoretical, numerical, and experimental results, as we revisit this longstanding problem with new numerical evidence.