CFD Simulations of Flow Characteristics of a Piano Key Weir Spillway

Sammanfattning: Comprehensive rehabilitation projects of dam spillways are made in Sweden, due to stricter dam safety guidelines for their discharge capacity. The Piano Key Weir (PKW) is an innovative design which has proven effective through several renovation projects made in many countries including France. In this study we investigate the flow patterns around a prototype PKW, located in Escouloubre dam in southern France, with numerical simulations through three different flow cases in Ansys Fluent. A computational domain containing the PKW is created in the CAD software Ansys SpaceClaim for the simulations. Three polyhexcore meshes are further generated using Ansys Fluent Meshing. The three flow cases are then simulated with a Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) model, coupled with realizable k-epsilon and volume of fluid models. Through an assessment of the discretization error between three meshes, a relative error of one percent is obtained for the discharge rate. The numerical results are qualitatively compared with results from previously conducted physical experiments on this PKW. The RANS model does not capture the water surface undulations (due to turbulence) around the PKW. The effects from under modelled surface undulations are alleviated by inserting an air vent to the PKW, which results in a flow behaviour in good agreement with the physical experiments. Through this alteration, water discharge rates are computed with a maximum discrepancy of five percent compared with the corresponding experimental values. A large eddy simulation should be conducted in the future, to bring further light on air exchange and water interaction phenomena present in the PKW flow pattern.