Novel Approach to Computing Critical and Normal Depth in Circular Channels

The critical depth and normal depth computation are essential for hydraulic engineers to understanding the characteristics of varied flow in open channels. These depths are fundamental to analyze the flow for irrigation, drainage, and sewer pipes. Several explicit solutions to calculate critical and normal depths in different shape open channels were discovered over time. Regardless of the complexity of using these explicit solutions, these formulas have a significant error percentage compared to the exact solution. Therefore, this research explicitly calculates the normal and critical depth in circular channels and finds simple, fast, and accurate equations. First, the dimensional analysis was used to propose an analytical equation for measuring the circular channels' critical and normal depths. Then, regression analysis has been carried for 2160 sets of discharge versus critical and normal depths data in a circular open channel. The results show that this study's proposed equation for measuring the circular channels' critical and normal depths overcomes the error percentage in previous studies. Furthermore, the proposed equation offers efficiency and precision compared with other previous solutions.

Numerical Simulations of 2D Hydraulic Jumps by a Parallel SPH Model

Hydraulic jumps are a rapid transition from supercritical to subcritical flow and generally occur in rivers or spillways. Owing to the high energy dissipation rate, hydraulic jumps are widely applied as energy dissipators in hydraulic projects. To achieve efficient and accurate simulations of 2D hydraulic jumps in open channels, a parallel Weakly Compressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics model (WCSPH) with Shepard Density filter was established in this study. The acceleration of the model was obtained by OpenMP to reduce execution time. To further reduce execution time, a suitable and efficient scheduling strategy was selected for the parallel numerical model by comparing parallel speed-ups under different scheduling strategies in OpenMP. Following this, two test cases of uniform flow in open channels and hydraulic jumps with different inflow conditions were investigated to validate the model. The comparison of the water depth and velocity fields between the numerical results and the analytical solution generally showed good agreement, although there was a minor discrepancy in conjugate water depths. The numerical results showed free surface undulation with decreasing amplitude, which is more consistent with physical reality, with a low inflow Froude number. Simultaneously, the Shepard filter was able to smooth the pressure fields of the hydraulic jumps with a high inflow Froude number. Moreover, the parallel speed-up was generally able to reach theoretical maximum acceleration by analyzing the performance of the model according to different particle numbers.