Investigation of flow over spillway modeling and comparison between experimental data and CFD analysis

Abstract

As a part of design process for hydro-electric generating stations, hydraulic engineers typically conduct some form of model testing. The desired outcome from the testing can vary considerably depending on the specific situation, but often characteristics such as velocity patterns, discharge rating curves, water surface profiles, and pressures at various locations are measured. Due to recent advances in computational power and numerical techniques, it is now also possible to obtain much of this information through numerical modeling. In this paper, hydraulic characteristics of Kavsak Dam and Hydroelectric Power Plant (HEPP), which are under construction and built for producing energy in Turkey, were investigated experimentally by physical model studies. The 1/50-scaled physical model was used in conducting experiments. Flow depth, discharge and pressure data were recorded for different flow conditions. Serious modification was made on the original project with the experimental study. In order to evaluate the capability of the computational fluid dynamics on modeling spillway flow a comparative study was made by using results obtained from physical modeling and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation. A commercially available CFD program, which solves the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations, was used to model the numerical model setup by defining cells where the flow is partially or completely restricted in the computational space. Discharge rating curves, velocity patterns and pressures were used to compare the results of the physical model and the numerical model. It was shown that there is reasonably good agreement between the physical and numerical models in flow characteristics.