Investigating the accuracy of CFD simulations for Denil fishway through comparison with field installations

Date

2025-9-1

Author

Bahtiyar, Doruk

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

90
views

0
downloads

Cite This

Fishways are man-made structures designed to assist fish in crossing obstacles such as dams and weirs. Denil fishway is one of the most used fishways due to its simplicity, ease of construction, and cost-effectiveness. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has been utilized for a long time, providing detailed insights into understanding the flow in hydraulic structures. It is used to simulate the complex behavior of fluid flows without the need for costly experiments. CFD models of the Denil fishway have been validated in highly controlled laboratory settings; however, the accuracy of a CFD model compared to actual field installations has not been thoroughly established. The main objective of this research is to develop a base CFD model of the Denil fishway, apply that model to eight field installations located in Montana, USA, and evaluate the model’s performance against field measurements. It was observed that, based on the average discharge data calculated using the five most commonly used rating curve equations in the literature, the CFD models accurately predicted the discharges in the Denil fishway, with an average error of 10.47%. Using various water depths, rating curves were developed with the CFD models which indicated good agreement with the two well-known Denil rating curve equations by Katopodis et al. (1997) and Odeh (2003).

Subject Keywords

Computational fluid dynamics, FLOW-3D, Numerical modeling, Fishway, Open channel flow

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/116092

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis