Author(s): Davide Vanzo; Daniel A. S. Conde; Annunziato Siviglia; David F. Vetsch
Linked Author(s): Davide Vanzo, Annunziato Siviglia
Keywords: Open channel flows; RANS; Numerical modelling; GPU; Relaxation
Abstract: Turbulent flows encompass a broad spectrum of phenomena in environmental and hydraulic engineering. This study focuses on turbulent shallow flows, characterized by a horizontal extent that significantly exceeds the scale of flow depth, often found in environmental flows. A widely adopted approach is the coupling of Shallow-Water Equations (SWE) solvers with Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) turbulence closures. In this work, we introduce a robust and efficient depth-averaged (DA) unsteady RANS solver, where viscous and turbulent stresses are modeled as conservative hyperbolic fluxes using Cattaneo’s relaxation technique (see e.g. Vanzo et al 2016). The implementation of such solution on GPU-accelerated hydrodynamic solvers is robust and seamless as does not require extensive alteration of the data structure, allowing for application on extended computational domains.
Year: 2025