OGEE SPILLWAY HYDRAULIC STUDY WITH NUMERICAL MODEL

Due to lack of easy and common analytical tools, the design of the hydraulic structures must often be based on physical model studies. The cost of building, operating, and housing of these models is exorbitant. With the rapidly changing advances in computational modeling for solving the governing equations of fluid flow, engineers now face the decision of which methods to use in evaluating projects. The use of numerical methods is attractive in terms of lower cost and substantially reduced analysis time. The need for result validation is therefore vital throughout the design process so that the analysis technique/methodology can be trusted and designers have confidence in the computed results. The common practice is to validate the results against classical theory, experimental data, published data, performance of similar structures and numerical computation done by others. Before undertaking any numerical analysis, the analysts should decide how reliable the input data is, whether the software tool can solve the problem in question and how to validate the results. This study gives application of the computer package, FLUENT, which solves the Navier- Stokes equations to simulate the complex flow over ogee spillway. The numerical technique is based on finite volume method, and turbulence effects are simulated by a k-ε model. Results of numerical model were satisfactory in comparing with the results of other published works.