Numerical modeling of a slotted flip bucket spillway system – The Shibuya Hydropower Project. 

Abstract: CFD is today a big part of the design process in hydraulic engineering and is more economical and time efficient than traditional scale models. But, there are still issues concerning the agreement with scale models in large and complex geometries. In this degree project a high head, five channeled, slotted flip bucket spillway system is analyzed with the CFD software FLUENT and compared with existing scale model results. The sought hydraulic parameters in each channel were the discharge capacity, the pressure distribution and the throw distance from the flip buckets. The discharge capacity and pressure distribution was practically equal for all five channels and only the throw distance from Channel 1 deviated from the others. The agreement with data from the scale model is quite low. The biggest error sources behind the bad agreement may depend on the lack of computational power which led to bad choice of cell size, model delimitations and simplifications. CFD models can easily be built up by people without experience in hydraulics which can lead to fatal errors when building up the model and interpreting results. Hence, long experience in CFD or verification of the numerical results with several different hydraulic parameters is the only way to guarantee qualitative results from CFD modeling.