3D Numerical Modeling of John Day Lock Tainter Valves

The reverse tainter valves in the culverts at John Day Lock have been failing structurally for the life of the project. Recently, district engineers have decided to redesign these tainter valves to reduce or eliminate cracking and other structural issues. In order to complete this redesign, three-dimensional (3D) simulations were conducted of the flows experienced through the culverts for several valve openings seen during a lock operation. These 3D simulations were performed with the 3D Navier-Stokes module of the numerical code Adaptive Hydraulics (ADH) (http://adh.usace.army.mil/) developed by the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center, Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory (CHL). This code models the complex 3D flows around hydraulic structures using adaptive meshing techniques on unstructured meshes. The flow variables, pressure and velocity, calculated at each node lying on the surface of the valve were exported for use as boundary conditions for a 3D structural model of the tainter valve.