Flow and Sediment Transport Through Bottom Racks. CFD Application and Verification with Experimental Measurements.

Bottom rack intake systems are designed to get the maximum quantity of water in mountain rivers with important transport of sediments. Some attentions have been given to the occlusion of the racks due to the deposition of debris over them or to the quantity of sediments that gets into the racks and is transported along the derivation channel. Currently, we want to optimize this kind of intake systems to use them in discontinuous and torrential streams with high sediments concentrations. Some experimental studies have found a correlation between the influence of the sediments and the flow derived by the rack (Orth et al., 1954). Krochin (1978) proposes an increment coefficient in the length of the rack for considering the clog problems. Drobir (1981) published some results for different types of sieve curves in mountain rivers. The methodology of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), which is based on numerical solution of the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations together with turbulence models of different degrees of complexity, simulates the interaction between different fluids, such as the sediment transport and the air-water two-phase flow that appear in the phenomenon of intake systems. This paper compares and discusses the results obtained using a CFD numerical model with the experimental results obtained by Noseda (1956), Drobir (1981) and UPCT Lab.

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