Model coupling techniques for free-surface flow problems. Part II

In view of the numerical simulation of a complex hydrodynamic system, we provide in this paper a possible strategy, alternative to that one proposed in the first part of this work [Miglio et al., Proceedings of the Fourth World Congress of Nonlinear Analysis WCNA-2004, Orlando, FL, USA, 2004, accepted]. The main aim of both the approaches is to contain the computational cost of the numerical simulation without compromising the accuracy of the proposed mathematical model. In more detail, we introduce here a dimensionally homogeneous–physically heterogeneous coupling strategy, moving from a hierarchy of 2D Saint-Venant like hydrodynamic models. This time the “subdomain-to-model” correspondence is identified automatically thanks to a suitable a posteriori modeling error estimator. As in the first part of this work, we aim to examine the reliability of this approach moving from some preliminary numerical results.