The Momentum Conserving Scheme Implementation for Simulating Dambreak Flow in a Channel with Various Contractions

Abstract

Abstract Rapid flow downstream due to dambreak has a detrimental effect on the surrounding environment or, more dangerously, can be life-threatening. From a practical point of view, these flows are important to studies due to the limited dambreak real case data. This paper discusses the numerical modelling of the dambreak flow through a channel with three different contractions. Our goal here is to investigate the performance of a numerical model for solving the Saint-Venant equations using a momentum conserving staggered grid scheme (MCS). The scheme is the conservative formulation of the governing equations. Flows across channels of various widths and depths have been successfully simulated using a version of this scheme. In this work, we extend our previous work by simulating dambreak flow in a wave tank through several forms of contraction; trapezoidal and triangular. Our simulation results show good agreement with the experimental data in the literature. This assessment shows the merit of the scheme, which is suitable for dambreak flows in channels of varying width.