Author(s)

James Yang & Bengt Hemstrom

Abstract

Physical model tests are traditionally used in engineering practice to study hydraulic problems related to dam and spillway structures. Thanks to its rapid development during the past few years, numerical technique has been adopted to replace model tests in solving some of the hydraulic problems. In a R&D project, the CFD program STAR-CD is employed to simulate the discharge capacity of a standard WES spillway. Experiments are made separately to verify the numerical results. The agreement between the numerical simulations and experiments proves to be generally good. STAR-CD can reach the same order of accuracy as a model test usually can. With the technique Embedded Mesh Refinement, the CPU time can be significantly shortened. The study has shown that CFD has potential and is a useful too

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