Turbulence over Coral Reefs
Summary
TurboCor is an independent project mainly supported by NWO-Snellius computing grant that aims to better understand the hydrodynamics within morphologically complex coral reef boundary layers. The central idea is to apply scale-resolving computational methods to study the effect of simple and complex coral reef hydrodynamics at a scale never studied before.
Work in progress
Turbulence Dynamics within stochastically generated coral reefs over flat topography
This study used a synthetically generated coral reef over flat topography with varying reef height and density to understand the in-canopy turbulence dynamics. Using a turbulence-resolving computational framework, we found that most of the turbulent kinetic energy dissipation is confined to a region below the top of the reef and above the Stokes boundary layer. The results also suggest that most of the vertical Reynolds stress peaks within this region positively contribute to the down-gradient momentum flux during the forward phase of the wave cycle. These findings shed light on the physical relationships between in-canopy flow and morphologically complex coral reefs, thereby motivating a further need to explore the hydrodynamics of such flows using a scale-resolving computational framework.
Pre-print: Hydrodynamics of In-Canopy Flow in Synthetically Generated Coral Reefs Under Oscillatory Wave Motion
Software: Turbocor-GitHub Repository
Comparative Hydrodynamic Characterization of Coral Reefs
This study addresses this knowledge gap using a turbulence-resolving computational framework based on the volume-penalizing immersed boundary method (vIBM). Comparing the serial, staggered, and stochastic arrangements of various coral roughness types we observe that massive corals and cylinders lead to a similar hydrodynamics response and the effect of dispersive stresses can introduce a large difference when stochastic coral reefs are considered. These observations highlight the importance of better understanding the hydrodynamics of complex coral reef geometries, emphasizing the need for further studies on this aspect of coral reef hydrodynamics. This work will be presented/published as part of the Coastal Dynamics 2025 meeting in Portugal.
Pre-print: A Comparative Hydrodynamic Characterization of the Flow Through Regular and Stochastically Generated Synthetic Coral Reefs Over Flat Topography
Software: GenSDF-GitHub Repository
Dispersive Stresses in coral-like boundary layers
In this work, we investigate the impact of dispersive stress that results in heterogeneity in the hydrodynamics response as the flow interacts with the complex roughness. Specifically, we systematically investigate the similarities and differences observed between a hydraulically rough wall comprised of an array of cylinders, massive corals, and branching corals arranged in a staggered manner along with a stochastically generated coral bed.
Pre-print: Work in Preparation
Funding
This work made use of the Dutch national e-infrastructure with the support of the SURF Cooperative using grant no. EINF-6125, supplemented by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). This publication is part of the project “Unraveling the Turbulence Dynamics: Investigating Wave-Induced Turbulence over Corals” (with project number EINF-6125, which is (partly) financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Additionally, this work made use of the Dutch national e-infrastructure with the support of the SURF Cooperative supplemented by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) “Multi-fidelity computational modeling of environmental fluid systems” with grant number 2024/ENW/01763969.
