Simulation of flow over stepped and traditional spillways

Abstract

There are several challenges that are faced by these structures, such as cavitation and high speed of flow during the dissipation of flow energy. The spillway is one of the key basic elements of dams that are utilized to pass huge volumes of discharge. The current work used computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to numerically estimate the water surface flow and pressure distribution over stepped and traditional spillways. The numerical findings were compared with experimental data using the Renormalization group k- model. The numerical and experimental data have been compared, and it has been determined that there is an acceptable agreement between the two sets of findings.