Simulation of Turbulent Free Surface Obstructed Flow within Channels

Abstract

Free surface flows of practical relevance in many engineering problems are almost always turbulent. In this paper, a numerical model to compute the free surface flow with turbulent effects is presented. The shallow water equations together with a k-ε turbulent model are discretized and simulated using a MUSCL-HANCOCK finite volume scheme. The proposed 2D k-ε shallow water model calculates the depth-averaged quantities such as water depth and velocity profile. The depth-averaged turbulent viscous stresses are determined from the depthaveraged version of a traditional 3D k-ε turbulent model. The numerical model is applied to a flow within channels that contain full depth obstructions. The k-ε turbulent model results are compared with existing Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) predictions and show a high level of accuracy.