Numerical models with hydrostatic pressure have been widely utilized in studying flows in rivers, estuaries and coastal areas. The hydrostatic assumption is valid for the large-scale surface flows where the vertical acceleration can be ignored, but for some particular cases the hydrodynamic pressure is important. In this paper, a vertical 2D mathematical model with non-hydrostatic pressure was implemented in the σ coordinate. A fractional step method was used to enable the pressure to be decomposed into hydrostatic and hydrodynamic components and the predictor-corrector approach was applied to integration in time domain. Finally, several computational cases were studied to validate the importance of contributions of the hydrodynamic pressure.
Higher order Boussinesq-type equations for wave propagation over variable bathymetry were derived. The time dependent free surface boundary conditions were used to compute the change of the free surface in time domain. The free surface velocities and the bottom velocities were connected by the exact solution of the Laplace equation. Taking the velocities on half relative water depth as the fundamental unknowns, terms relating to the gradient of the water depth were retained in the inverse series expansion of the exact solution, with which the problem was closed. With enhancements of the finite order Taylor expansion for the velocity field, the application range of the present model was extended to the slope bottom which is not so mild. For linear properties, some validation computations of linear shoaling and Booij's tests were carried out. The problems of wave-current interactions were also studied numerically to test the performance of the enhanced Boussinesq equations associated with the effect of currents. All these computational results confirm perfectly to the theoretical solution as well as other numerical solutions of the full potential problem available.
