Validation of a numerical particle based method for free surface flow downstream of sluice gates

Abstract

This study is a numerical investigation in which a meshfree computational method known as the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is applied to examine its efficiency and accuracy in predicting the flow field variables of free surface flow passing a sluice gate. For this purpose, the numerical 2D SPHysics model, as an implementation of the computational SPH method, is adopted. The numerical code is validated against the theoretical and experimental results of previous works. The validation is performed taking into consideration the conjugate flow depths and velocities for different total upstream heads passing under a fixed gate opening height. The quantitative agreement between the results computed by the numerical 2D SPHysics code and the theoretical and experimental results is fairly good confirming that the numerical code is robust in predicting the flow properties in sluice gates. Then, the validated code is used to find the energy dissipation rate for various total upstream heads and Froude numbers. The results obtained in this study are promising, indicating that the numerical model can be considered as an efficient alternative tool for hydraulic engineers to predict and understand the flow behavior in hydraulic structures.