The objectives of this work are to revisit the experimental measurements on dam break flow over a dry horizontal bed and to provide a detailed insight into the dynamics of the dam break wave impacting a vertical wall downstream the dam, with emphasis on the pressure loads. The measured data are statistically analyzed and critically discussed. As a result, an extensive set of data for validation of computational tools is provided

This paper presents a brief review of grand challenges of Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method. As a meshless method, SPH can simulate a large range of applications from astrophysics to free-surface flows, to complex mixing problems in industry and has had notable successes. As a young computational method, the SPH method still requires development to address important elements which prevent more widespread use. This effort has been led by members of the SPH rEsearch and engineeRing International Community (SPHERIC) who have identified SPH Grand Challenges. The SPHERIC SPH Grand Challenges (GCs) have been grouped into 5 categories: (GC1) convergence, consistency and stability, (GC2) boundary conditions, (GC3) adaptivity, (GC4) coupling to other models, and (GC5) applicability to industry. The SPH Grand Challenges have been formulated to focus the attention and activities of researchers, developers, and users around the world. The status of each SPH Grand Challenge is presented in this paper with a discussion on the areas for future development.

The theoretical formulation of the smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) method deserves great care because of some inconsistencies occurring when considering free-surface inviscid flows. Actually, in SPH formulations one usually assumes that (i) surface integral terms on the boundary of the interpolation kernel support are neglected, (ii) free-surface conditions are implicitly verified. These assumptions are studied in detail in the present work for free-surface Newtonian viscous flow. The consistency of classical viscous weakly compressible SPH formulations is investigated. In particular, the principle of virtual work is used to study the verification of the free-surface boundary conditions in a weak sense. The latter can be related to the global energy dissipation induced by the viscous term formulations and their consistency. Numerical verification of this theoretical analysis is provided on three free-surface test cases including a standing wave, with the three viscous term formulations investigated.