CFD Applications to Flow Rating Development

Flow rating at hydraulic structures is very crucial to the water resource management and environmental integrity of South Florida. In practice, engineers are facing various challenges in their effort to improve water quality in the Everglades Watershed and throughout the South Florida ecosystem. Due to site constraints, manufacturer limitations, and special design needs etc., new structure types or new flow conditions, which are not considered in the current flow algorithms very often occur and call for developing new algorithms to properly estimate the flows. Three-dimensional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a powerful and cost-effective technique, which allows to fully investigate the flow mechanism as the rating development is needed to capture specific features. In this paper, CFD was applied for improving and developing the new culvert full pipe equation. The developed algorithms are verified with field stream flow measurements collected at prototype structure sites. In comparative analyses, good agreement between rated and measured flows have been achieved and the algorithms derived from CFD applications are employed to the real practices.