Aeration and risk mitigation for flood discharge tunnel in Zipingpu water conservancy project

Abstract: The importance of hydraulic structures has become an essential mitigating mean for floodsthat occur more often due to climate change. Thus, the importance and safety of flooddischarge tunnels has promoted further studies and experiments on the topic to mitigatedamages, such as cavitation that arise because of high speed flows.After an experimental study on a physical model was carried out on the flood discharge tunnelin Zipingpu Water Conservancy project, a CFD model was designed and simulated in thecommercial software ANSYS Fluent. The simulations aimed to evaluate and examine the riskfor cavitation in the tunnel, examine the design problems of the structure and analyse theinstalled aerators for the mitigation of cavitation. Moreover, using CFD models as acomplementary form to physical models was analyzed.A three dimensional geometry of the discharge tunnel was built in ANSYS Spaceclaim and themesh conducted with ANSYS mesh generator. The known boundary condition such as thedesign flow conditions, velocity inlet, pressure inlets and pressure outlet were set. For themodel a multiphase VOF scheme with RANS approach, k-ϵ turbulence model and a standardwall function was set.The results from the initial simulations showed that the discharge tunnel was under cavitationrisk, since the recorded cavitation index in the tunnel was below 1.8. After having revised thelayout of the aerators in order to mitigate cavitation risk, the results from the simulations withadded aerators were sufficient to mitigate the risk as the cavitation index was still below 1.8.The results for the cavitation index remained unchanged even in the simulated models with adifferent solver setup that were used in the comparison with the experimental data in order tovalidate them.As a conclusion, it was recommended that the tunnel design has to be revised and improvedby adding more aerators and air vents to mitigate the cavitation risk. Furthermore, more studieson the discharge tunnel or similar tunnels with similar conditions should be carried out in orderto validate the results of this study and determine if numerical models are preferable to physicalmodels