Background
River confluence occur at the intersection between two rivers and is an important section of river networks commonly encountered in nature. River confluences have a complex flow and sedimentation pattern which can cause a scour hole in this region. The flow and sedimentation pattern of this location is very important and interesting for researchers. Recently, collars have been introduced and used to reduce the maximum scour hole at river confluences. A collar is an installed plate which is usually used for protecting bridge piers from scouring.
Objective
It would be very interesting and valuable to simulate the application of collars at river confluences and evaluate the effect of using a collar on scour hole development. One such tool for numerical simulation is REEF3D, a newly developed model by NTNU. The objective being to model the effects of introducing collars at river confluence, testing the effects of altering properties of the collar, hydraulics and modelling parameters.
Requirements:
- Knowledge of open channel hydraulics.
- Knowledge of computational hydraulics.
Tasks:
- Numerical modelling of the collar at river confluences (REEF3D:SFLOW is tested before and can be one option).
- Changing various geometric, hydraulic, and numerical parameters to evaluate the effect on flow and scour pattern with and without using a collar.
- Geometric parameters such as size of collar, hydraulic parameters such as different discharge etc. numerical parameters such as relaxation factor etc.
Fig. 1: River confluence in India (Singh, V.P. et al., 2011)
Fig. 2: Flow Simulation at river confluence with REEF3D (Balouchi, B. et al., 2021)
Fig. 3: Physcal Physical modelling of collar at river confluence