High order upwind scheme for modelling turbulent shallow water flow in hydraulic structures

Abstract An unstructured finite volume model for quasi‐2D free surface flow with wet‐dry fronts and turbulence modelling is presented. The convective flux is discretised with either a an hybrid second‐order/first‐order scheme, or a fully second order scheme, both of them upwind Godunov's schemes based on Roe's average. The hybrid scheme uses a second order discretisation for the two unit discharge components, whilst keeping a first order discretisation for the water depth [2]. In such a way the numerical diffusion is much reduced, without a significant reduction on the numerical stability of the scheme, obtaining in such a way accurate and stable results. It is important to keep the numerical diffusion to a minimum level without loss of numerical stability, specially when modelling turbulent flows, because the numerical diffusion may interfere with the real turbulent diffusion. In order to avoid spurious oscillations of the free surface when the bathymetry is irregular, an upwind discretisation of the bed slope source term [4] with second order corrections is used [2]. In this way a fully second order scheme which gives an exact balance between convective flux and bed slope in the hydrostatic case is obtained. The k – ε equations are solved with either an hybrid or a second order scheme. In all the numerical simulations the importance of using a second order upwind spatial discretisation has been checked [1]. A first order scheme may give rather good predictions for the water depth, but it introduces too much numerical diffusion and therefore, it excessively smooths the velocity profiles. This is specially important when comparing different turbulence models, since the numerical diffusion introduced by a first order upwind scheme may be of the same order of magnitude as the turbulent diffusion. (© 2008 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)