What is SMS?

SMS is a comprehensive environment for one-, two-, and three-dimensional hydrodynamic modeling. New enhancements and developments continue at the Environmental Modeling Research Laboratory (EMRL) at Brigham Young University  in cooperation with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC), and the U.S. Federal Highway Administration (FHWA).

SMS is a pre- and post-processor for surface water modeling, analysis, and design. It includes tools for:

Interfaces specifically designed to facilitate the utilization of several numerical models comprise the modules of SMS. Supported models include:

These numeric models will compute a variety of information applicable to surface water modeling. The principle application has been hydrodynamic modeling. This involves the calculation of water surface elevations and flow velocities for shallow water flow problems and support both a steady-state and dynamic model. Additional applications include the modeling of contaminant migration, salinity intrusion, sediment transport (scour and deposition), wave energy dispersion, wave properties (directions, magnitudes and amplitudes) and various others.

The finite element mesh, finite difference grid, or cross section entities along with associated boundary conditions necessary for analysis may be specified and edited within SMS and saved to model specific files. These files are used to perform the hydrodynamic, contaminant migration, sediment transport or other desired analyses. The numerical models create solution files that contain the water surface elevations, flow velocities, contaminant concentrations, sediment concentrations or other functional data at each node, cell, or section. SMS reads this data and generates profiles and cross sectional plots, two-dimensional vector plots, drogue plots, color-shaded contour plots, time variant curve plots, and dynamic animation to enhance understanding and interpretation of numerical solutions.

As mentioned above, SMS can also be used as a pre- and post-processor for other finite element or finite difference programs provided the programs can be made to read and write files in a supported format. SMS is well suited for the construction of large, complex meshes (several thousand elements) of arbitrary shape.

This document is meant to be a reference manual for SMS only. While it includes chapters describing specific model interface components, details on the analysis software are contained in separate documents. It is assumed that the user is familiar with the overall modeling process and terms defined in the appropriate supporting reference manual.

SMS was designed as a comprehensive hydrodynamic modeling system. As part of an ongoing effort, other analysis models will be supported in future versions.

Modules

The interface for SMS is divided into six separate modules. A module is provided for each of the basic data types supported by SMS. As the user switches from one module to another, the Tool Palette and the menus change. This allows you to focus only on the tools and commands related to the data you are currently processing. Switching from one module to another can be done instantaneously to facilitate the simultaneous use of several data types when necessary. In many cases, the data may be converted from one format to another. The commands and tools available are also specialized based on the numerical model to be employed. For example, the mesh module provides the basic tools for both TABS and FESWMS. The user selects which model will be used and the tools and menus specific to that model become available. Switching from one model to another results in the conversion of applicable data. However, data specific to one model may be lost in this conversion. Commands specific to an analysis model reside in a menu corresponding to that model. Later chapters give details of applications and tools in each module, but a brief description follows here. The following modules are supported in SMS.