Two-dimensional shock capturing numerical simulation of shallow water flow applied to dam break analysis

With the advances in the computing world, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is becoming more and more critical tool in the field of fluid dynamics. In the past few decades, a huge number of CFD models have been developed with ever improved performance. In this research a robust CFD model, called Riemann2D, is extended to model flow over a mobile bed and applied to a full scale dam break problem. Riemann2D, an object oriented hyperbolic solver that solves shallow water equations with an unstructured triangular mesh and using high resolution shock capturing methods, provides a generic framework for the solution of hyperbolic problems. The object-oriented design of Riemann2D has the flexibility to apply the model to any type of hyperbolic problem with the addition of new information and inheriting the common components from the generic part of the model. In a part of this work, this feature of Riemann2D is exploited to enhance the model capabilities to compute flow over mobile beds. This is achieved by incorporating the two dimensional version of the one dimensional non-capacity model for erodible bed hydraulics by Cao et al. (2004). A few novel and simple algorithms are included, to track the wet/dry and dry/wet fronts over abruptly varying topography and stabilize the solution while using high resolution shock capturing methods. The negative depths computed from the surface gradient by the limiters are algebraically adjusted to ensure depth positivity. The friction term contribution in the source term, that creates unphysical values near the wet/dry fronts, are resolved by the introduction of a limiting value for the friction term. The model is validated using an extensive variety of tests both on fixed and mobile beds. The results are compared with the analytical, numerical and experimental results available in the literature. The model is also tested against the actual field data of 1957 Malpasset dam break. Finally, the model is applied to simulate dam break flow of Warsak Dam in Pakistan. Remotely sensed topographic data of Warsak dam is used to improve the accuracy of the solution. The study reveals from the thorough testing and application of the model that the simulated results are in close agreement with the available analytical, numerical and experimental results. The high resolution shock capturing methods give far better results than the traditional numerical schemes. It is also concluded that the object oriented CFD model is very easy to adapt and extend without changing the generic part of the model.