Roughness effects on turbulence characteristics in an open channel flow

Abstract

A comprehensive study was carried out to understand the effect of roughness on the turbulence characteristics of flow in an open channel. To this end, tests were conducted with four different types of bed surface conditions at two different Reynolds number (Re = 47 500 and 31 000). This includes the use of an impermeable smooth bed, impermeable rough bed, permeable sand bed, and an impermeable bed with distributed roughness. The roughness is generated using sand grains of median diameter 2.46 mm. The effect of bed roughness is seen to have penetrated through most of the flow depth, disputing the conventional "wall similarity" hypothesis. The results show that the distributed roughness generates the largest roughness effect. The differences in the characteristics as noted by the velocity triple products exceed 200% between the flow over the smooth and rough beds. Although the same sand grain is used to create the different rough bed conditions, there are differences in turbulence characteristics, which is an indication that specific geometry of the roughness has an influence. A quadrant analysis indicates that roughness increases the contribution of the extreme turbulent events that produce very large instantaneous Reynolds shear stress and consequently influence the flow.