Seiches in lateral cavities with simplified planform geometry: Oscillation modes and synchronization with the vortex shedding

Abstract

Lateral cavities adjacent to open-channel flows are dead zones located on one side of a main stream. With an approaching flow with a high (subcritical) Froude number, the free-surface of the dead-zone oscillates with high amplitudes and generates a so-called seiche. This configuration is reproduced in a rectangular cavity (with an interface length equal to the main stream channel width) in which the impact of the three dimensionless parameters (Froude number, dimensionless water depth, and geometrical aspect ratio) affecting the seiche is studied experimentally. For all configurations, a natural mode of the cavity is observed, this mode being either longitudinal or transverse, except in the case of a square cavity where bi-directional seiching occurs. Moreover, we show that while the approaching Froude number (0.55 < Fr < 0.7) and dimensionless water depth do not affect the oscillation mode, the selected natural mode is strongly dependent on the geometrical aspect ratio of the cavity. For narrow cavities (small [W + b]/b with W and b the cavity and channel widths, respectively), a longitudinal mode occurs while for wider cavities transverse modes occur, with an increasing number of nodes as the width of the cavity increases. Finally, measuring the time-resolved 2-dimensional field of free-surface deformation in the cavity and the adjacent main stream permits us to identify the vortices shed along the mixing layer at the cavity/main stream interface and thus to analyze the synchronization between the surface oscillation and vortex shedding (at the upstream edge) and impinging (at the downstream edge) processes.