TWO-PHASE FLOW SIMULATIONS OF SCOUR AROUND VERTICAL AND HORIZONTAL CYLINDERS

Abstract

Scour around structures is a major engineering issue that requires a detailed description of the flow field as well as sediment transport processes. Due to enhanced suspended load associated with vortices generated around structures, sediment transport cannot be solely related to bed shear stress, such as Shields parameter based formula. In order to address this issue, we used a multi-dimensional two-phase flow solver, sedFoam-2.0 (Chauchat et al., GMD 2017) implemented under the open-source CFD toolbox OpenFOAM. Three configurations are studied and compared with experimental and numerical data from the literature. First, the 2D configurations of an horizontal cylinder lying on a sediment bed (Mao, 1986; Sumer et al., 2001) are investigated. Then, the 3D configuration of the scour around a vertical cylindrical pile reported by Roulund et al. (2005) for rigid-bed and live bed cases is investigated.