EVALUATION OF VELOCITY VARIATION IN A CHUTE AS A FUNCTION OF ROUGHNESS
Author(s):
Plua Frank1*, Hidalgo Victor2, Ortega Patricio1, Ruiz Marcelo1
Affiliation(s):
1Departamento de Ingeniería Civil y Ambiental, Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Quito, Ecuador.
2Departamento de Ingeniería Mecánica, Escuela Politécnica Nacional, Quito, Ecuador.
*Corresponding Author Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The present paper establishes numerical simulations with CFD packages for analyze the velocity variation as a function of roughness in a chute, and to determine the use of OpenFOAM® CFD package for this phenomenon. Experimental data was obtained from a physical hydraulic model with a smooth bottom and was compared with the results of numerical simulations from the CFD packages: ANSYS®, FLOW-3D® and OpenFOAM®. Subsequently, the roughness at the channel bottom was increased and new simulations were carried out for define the new velocity values. Increases in the resistance coefficient resulted in a significant reduction in velocity and the results of free open source OpenFOAM® are similar to those obtained in physical modeling as well as commercial software.