Optimization of submerged vane parameters

Abstract

Submerged vanes are airfoils which are in general placed at certain angle with respect to the flow direction in a channel to induce artificial circulations downstream. By virtue of these artificially generated circulations, submerged vanes were utilized to protect banks of rivers against erosion, to control shifting of rivers, to avoid blocking of lateral intake with sediment deposition, etc. Odgaard and his associates have experimentally obtained the optimum vane sizes and recommended that it can be used for vane design. This paper is an attempt to review and validate the findings of Odgaard and his associates by utilizing computational fluid dynamics and experiments as a tool in which the vane generated vorticity in the downstream was maximized in order to obtain optimum vane parameters for single and multiple vane arrays.