Comparative Hydrodynamic Study of Rigid-Lid and Level-Set Methods for LES of Open-Channel Flow
Publication: Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 145, Issue 1
Abstract
Computational modeling of open-channel flows at low Froude () numbers is often carried out using the rigid-lid assumption to prescribe the water surface location. However, the presence of wall-mounted hydraulic structures could cause to locally exceed unity, inducing a transition from subcritical to supercritical flow, locally accelerate the flow generating high-energy turbulent eddies at a constriction region, and lead to the formation of backwater at upstream regions. Under such circumstances, the rigid-lid assumption may not be adequate to obtain reliable flow field simulations. Previous investigation to examine the effect of a rigid-lid assumption on large-eddy simulation (LES) of a low-Reynolds open-channel flow showed that the second-order turbulent statistics are altered depending on the free-surface resolving method. In this work, we seek to study the rigid-lid effect on high-Reynolds LES applicable to natural river flows. We employed an in-house Virtual Flow Simulator (VFS-Geophysics) model in its LES mode to simulate the flow field in a similar test case that is scaled up to obtain a high Reynolds of . We performed LES evaluating the two free-surface resolving approaches: rigid-lid and level-set. The flow field and free-surface computations were validated using a series of measured data that we obtained by carrying out laboratory experiments. Our LES results indicate that at near-bed regions of the flume and around the bridge abutment, both the first- and second-order turbulent statistics are influenced by the method selected to prescribe the water surface.
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Acknowledgments
This work was partly supported by a grant from the California Department of Transportation (Contract No. 56A0532). The computational resources were provided by the Center for Excellence in Wireless and Information Technology (CEWIT) of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Stony Brook University. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments, which helped us to enhance the quality of our work.
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Published In
Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 145 • Issue 1 • January 2019
Copyright
©2018 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Dec 22, 2017
Accepted: Jun 26, 2018
Published online: Oct 16, 2018
Published in print: Jan 1, 2019
Discussion open until: Mar 16, 2019
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