Determination the Location of an Air Inception Point for Different Configurations of Stepped Spillways using CFD

Abstract

The goal of this research is to assess the impact of various factors on the position of the inception point for a stepped spillway, such as the number of steps, step angles, and discharges. It is feasible to determine the place of conception in this study using the computational fluid dynamics code Fluent. The volume of fluid (VOF) model is used to simulate air-water interaction on the free surface, and the turbulence closure is calculated using the realizable model. The code was tested against published experimental data of (Hunt and Kadavy 2009) for this purpose. The results of the ANSYS-fluent code compared with aforementioned experimental data and it match the experimental data. Then, the impact of the aforementioned factors on the location of an air inception point and its length were next investigated by simulating 45 cases in total.

Keywords

• Fluent, VOF, Inception point, Stepped spillway, Realizable k-ԑ Model, CFD.