Abstract: In the traditional mass source wave method, the accuracy is not high in the process of strong non-linear wave simulation, and the original setting of wave source area is complicated in different wave conditions. An improved method is proposed in this paper. Bidirectional quality outputs of the source area (lateral and vertical) are considered simultaneously, and the source function is improved and performed by theoretical derivation. The convergences of mesh and time step are verified based on the OpenFOAM program. The relative errors of second-order Stokes wave in amplitude and phase, comparing with traditional results, are discussed under different relative depths and different nonlinearity conditions. Then, a further simulation of the solitary waves propagation is performed. The numerical results show that the improved method can not only increase the efficiency but also improve the simulation accuracy of the mass source method in the high nonlinear range, especially when the nonlinearity parameter is 0.2, the amplitude error and the phase error are reduced by 21.7% and 46.5% respectively, compared to traditional ones.

Key words: mass source wave; source area shape; wave nonlinearity; OpenFOAM; solitary wave