High performance computing for river engineering

Publisher Summary River engineering projects can have a significant economic impact (beneficial or detrimental) on a geographic region. A portable, parallel, and efficient code for predicting the turbulent flow within compound, meandering open channels has been developed. The complete transport Reynolds-stress model of turbulence was used to close the governing equations. The capability of modeling meandering flows has been extended to include the effect of an overbank flow. Results have been presented for an overbank flow for which experimental measurements are available. The semi-implicit pressure correction algorithm, combined with the Rhie and Chow interpolation technique, is used to resolve the coupling among the velocities and pressure. If the computational grid for a compound channel is generated based on a regular mapped approach, then there are problems in making the best use of the number of control volumes available. The geometry is defined as a number of separate blocks and within each block, a regular grid is generated. The connectivity of the blocks needs to be established and the grids generated at the interface regions of adjoining blocks need to be consistently defined.