Numerical modeling of converging compound channel flow

Abstract

This paper presents numerical analysis for prediction of depth-averaged velocity distribution of compound channels with converging flood plains. Firstly, a 3D Computational Fluid Dynamics model is used to establish the basic database under various working conditions. Numerical simulation in two phases is performed using the ANSYS-Fluent software. k-ω turbulence model is executed to solve the basic governing equations. The results have been compared with high-quality flume measurements obtained from different converging compound channels in order to investigate the numerical accuracy. Then Artificial Neural Network are trained based on the Back Propagation Neural Network technique for depth-averaged velocity prediction in different converging sections and these test results are compared with each other and with actual data. The study has focused on the ability of the software to correctly predict the complex flow phenomena that occur in channel flows.

Keywords:

• Compound channel
• stage discharge
• prismatic
• non-prismatic
• ANN
• ANSYS

Acknowledgments

The author wish to acknowledge the support from the Institute and the UGC UKIERI Research project (ref no UGC-2013 14/017) by the second authors for carrying out the research work in the Hydraulics Laboratory at National Institute of Technology, Rourkela.