Journal of Hydraulic Engineering

Local scour around complex piers under steady clear-water condition was studied experimentally for a variety of configuration, including different sizes and shapes of complex piers. A total of 70 experiments were carried out. Three sets of experiments were performed over the entire range of possible pile cap elevations for complex piers with different geometrical characteristics. The collected data are used to quantify the pile cap elevations that maximize or minimize the local scour depth. Some of the available methodologies to estimate the maximum local scour depth around such complex piers are evaluated. The predictions of the scour depths improved by using the revised methods of Hydraulic Engineering Circular Number 18 and Coleman.

Chutes with flow velocities in excess of some 20 to 30 m/s are usually prone to cavitation damage. Therefore, these flows are aerated using chute aerators. The current literature describes the aerator efficiency mainly in terms of the air entrainment coefficient as the ratio of the entrained air and the water discharges. However, this global coefficient neither specifies the air distribution nor its detrainment rate. The present investigation focuses on the flow structure and the air transport downstream of chute aerators. Systematic hydraulic model tests were conducted including a data analysis of the spatial air concentration distribution in both the near and the far aerator fields. Based on these, three flow zones were introduced, namely: (1) jet zone; (2) reattachment and spray zone; and (3) far-field zone. It was further found that aerators have primarily an effect on the average air concentration, whereas the increase of the bottom air concentration is typically small.

Chute aerators are applied if cavitation damage on spillways is expected or observed. The aerator efficiency is usually described with the ratio of the air discharge entrained through the air supply ducts and the water discharge, which does however not account for the resulting air concentration distribution within the flow or for air detrainment. The present study investigates the streamwise development of the air transport along the flow downstream of chute aerators. Based on an extensive test program in which six governing parameters were systematically varied, the development of the average and the bottom air concentrations is provided up to the self-aeration point. Based on this information, an optimization of aerators in terms of increased air entrainment and reduced detrainment rates is possible, by assuming minimum required air concentrations. The main parameters influencing the air transport downstream of aerators are the approach flow Froude number, the deflector angle and the chute bottom angle.

Spectral analysis of velocity signals recorded by acoustic Doppler velocimetry (ADV) and contaminated with intermittent spikes remains a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a new method for reconstructing contaminated time series which integrates two previously developed techniques for detecting and replacing spurious spikes. The spikes are first detected using a modified version of the universal phase-space-thresholding technique and subsequently replaced by the last valid data points. The accuracy of the new approach is evaluated by applying it to identify and remove spikes and reconstruct the spectra of two clean data sets which are artificially contaminated with random spikes: (1) high-quality hot-wire measurement and (2) numerically simulated velocity time series with bimodal probability density distribution. The technique is also applied to reconstruct the spectra obtained from intentionally contaminated ADV measurements and compare them with ADV spectra at the same point in the flow obtained using proper ADV settings. Special emphasis is placed on testing the ability of the technique to reproduce realistic power spectra in flows with rich coherent dynamics. The results show that the power spectra of the reconstructed time series contain a filtered white noise caused by the steps in the reconstruction technique using the last valid data point. We show that even for a severely contaminated time series, the proposed method can accurately recover the power spectra up to the frequency corresponding to the half the mean sampling rate of the valid data points.

A hydraulic simulation study was carried out for Red Hill Creek, an urban stream channel in Ontario, Canada. Over one million simulations were conducted using the HEC-RAS4b model to evaluate the sensitivity of model predictions to field data accuracy, density and estimation techniques and provide guidance toward balancing human resource allocation with model accuracy. Increased cross-sectional discretization and improved estimates of floodplain roughness dominate the accuracy of the results of computed water surface elevations. For a range of field hours available for data collection, a sampling strategy focused on maximizing the number of sparsely detailed cross sections is shown to outperform a sampling strategy using the same number of field hours to sample fewer cross sections with a higher resolution.

Available discharge coefficient formulas for sharp-crested weirs are only applicable to the free-flow regime. To extend the range of discharge measurement by a rectangular sharp-crested weir, critical heads of the transition flow regime, the head-discharge relation for clinging and free flow, and the discharge coefficient for clinging flow were investigated experimentally based on more than 300 experimental points with head ranging from 0.0048 to 0.0455 m. The results indicate that the transitions from clinging to free flow and vice versa do not occur at the same head. Upper and lower critical heads, $H_{u,\text{crit}}$ and $H_{l,\text{crit}}$ , can be identified at which these transitions occur. For the condition studied, the head relation between clinging and free flow is found to be linearly correlated at the same discharge. Expressions for the discharge coefficient for clinging flow are developed.