SUMMARY
The Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method has proven to have great potential in dealing with the wave–structure interactions since it can deal with the large amplitude and breaking waves and easily captures the free surface. The paper will adopt an incompressible SPH (ISPH) approach to simulate the wave propagation and impact, in which the fluid pressure is solved using a pressure Poisson equation and thus more stable and accurate pressure fields can be obtained. The focus of the study is on comparing three different pressure gradient calculation models in SPH and proposing the most efficient first-order consistent kernel interpolation (C1_KI) numerical scheme for modelling violent wave impact. The improvement of the model is validated by the benchmark dam break flows and laboratory wave propagation and impact experiments.