Automated Water Control Structures Flow Rating Using CFD Generated Data

The South Florida Water Management District (SFWMD) operates and maintains over 650 water control structures. Flow through these structures are estimated with rating equations as a function of the headwater, tailwater stages, and operating conditions. Typically, field flow measurements are used for calibration, validation, and verification of the site-specific rating formulas. However, these measurements can be expensive and time consuming, but more importantly inadequate to cover all flow ranges. In recent years, the SFWMD has successfully developed and used a CFD-based flow rating framework. The application of this framework to large number of structures can be complex, and requires background knowledge of CFD. The focus of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of automating the application of developed flow rating framework using Visual Basic (VBA) and IronPython scripting. The parallel, pressure-based, non-hydrostatic commercial code ANSYS FLUENT was employed as the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) solver for demonstration. The developed automation process includes planning CFD data generation for boundary conditions, feeding the required data inputs to ANSYS Workbench from an Excel environment, executing the CFD simulations using IronPython script, passing back the simulation results to the Excel session, and conducting flow rating for multiple flow conditions at multiple structures using Excel VBA. This study demonstrates the feasibility of automating the entire structure rating process. The developed automation opens new frontiers in cost-effective flow ratings for large amount of water control structures.