Experimental study of the interaction of dambreak with a vertical cylinder

Abstract

The aim of this research has been to conduct experimental measurements of the dam break impact on a vertical cylinder placed over a dry horizontal bed. The work aims to emphasize the effect of cylinder cross-section on the nature of impact as well as provide accurate and comprehensive data for the validation of computational fluid dynamics(CFD) codes. The experimental setup is based on a series of experiments conducted in the Research Institute for Applied Mechanics (RIAM) between the years 2010 and 2017. The gate motion is thoroughly studied and a novel gate motion formula is proposed based on the recent experimental data. The effect of gate obstruction on the time of impact with the cylindrical obstacle is presented and correlated to the parameters of the proposed motion profile thus emphasizing its significance in the numerical modeling of dam break flow. The effect of the cross-section of the cylinder is studied by examining the pressure signal on the cylinder as well as the vertical wall downstream of the cylinder. The pressure on the wall is compared with the no-obstacle case to highlight its effect on the pressure of the downstream conditions. The square cylinder is found to experience fairly similar pressure impulse as the circular cylinder. However, the square cylinder seems to impede the flow momentum in the x-direction more than the circular case. The data-set presented in this article is provided as Supplementary Materials including gate motion measurement, pressure measurements, and high-resolution videos.