A numerical study of fluid flow in a vertical slot fishway with the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method

Abstract

Fishways have a great ecological importance as they help mitigate the interruptions of fish migration routes. In the present work, the novel DualSPHysics v4.4 solver, based on the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method (SPH), has been applied to perform three-dimensional (3-D) simulations of water flow in a vertical slot fishway (VSF). The model has been successfully calibrated against published field data of flow velocities that were measured with acoustic Doppler velocity probes. A state-of-the-art algorithm for the treatment of open boundary conditions using buffer layers has been applied to accurately reproduce discharges, water elevations, and average velocity profiles (longitudinal and transverse velocities) within the observed pool of the VSF. Results herein indicate that DualSPHysics can be an accurate tool for modeling turbulent subcritical free surface flows similar to those that occur in VSF. A novel relation between the number of fluid particles and the artificial viscosity coefficient has been formulated with a simple logarithmic fit.