Three-Gorges Dam Fine Sediment Pollutant Transport: Turbulence SPH Model Simulation of Multi-Fluid Flows

Abstract

The Three Gorges Dam (TGD) constructed at the Yangtze River, China represents a revolutionary project to battle against the mage-scale flooding problems while improving the local economy at the same time. However, the large-scale fine-size sediment and pollutant material transport caused by the TGD operation are found to be inevitable and long-lasting. In this paper, a multi-fluid Incompressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (ISPH) model is used to simulate the multi-fluid flows similar to the fine sediment materials transport (in muddy flows) and water flow mixing process. The SPH method is a mesh-free particle modeling approach that can treat the free surfaces and multi-interfaces in a straightforward manner. The proposed model is based on the universal multi-fluid flow equations and a unified pressure equation is used to account for the interaction arising from the different fluid components. A Sub-Particle-Scale (SPS) turbulence model is included to address the turbulence effect generated during the flow process. The proposed model is used to investigate two cases of multi-fluid flows generated from the polluted flow intrusions into another fluid. The computations are found in good agreement with the practical situations. Sensitivity studies have also been carried out to evaluate the particle spatial resolution and turbulence modeling on the flow simulations. The proposed ISPH model could provide a promising tool to study the practical multi-fluid flows in the TGD operation environment.