Study on numerical calculation of flow structures in a curved open channel with advanced depth-integrated models

Abstract

A better understanding of flow structures distribution in rivers is crucial to determine the safety degree of rivers. A practical and reliable model is required to overcome the issue of the long computational time of a three-dimensional calculation model and the lack of computation detail of a two-dimensional calculation model for flow structures distribution simulation in rivers. This paper presented an advanced depth-integrated numerical calculation method called the bottom velocity calculation (BVC) to reproduce the flow structures in a curved open channel. BVC method is an integrated multiscale simulation of flows in rivers that can evaluate vertical distributions of velocities and bottom velocity distributions by introducing depth-averaged horizontal vorticity and horizontal momentum equations on a water surface. It has several models, such as simplified bottom velocity calculation (SBVC) with shallow water assumption and general bottom velocity calculation (GBVC) method without the assumptions. The advantages of the BVC method, including SBVC and GBVC models, are validated in this paper using experimental datasets of a curved open channel and compared to two-dimensional and three-dimensional models. The results show that the BVC method has good reproducibility to simulate the flow structures distribution in the channel.