Quasi 3D refined simulation of flow and pollutant transport in a meandering River Reach

This paper reports a quasi 3D numerical simulation in a meandering river reach of the Yellow River, aiming to develop a tool for modeling turbulent flows and pollutant transport in complex natural waters. The recently built depth-averaged two-equation turbulence model, together with and models, were used to close non-simplified quasi 3D hydrodynamic fundamental governing equations. The discretized equations were solved by advanced multi-grid iterative method under non-orthogonal body-fitted coarse and fine two-levels’ grids with collocated variable arrangement. Except for steady flow and transport computation, the processes of contaminant inpouring and plume development, caused by the side-discharge from a tribytary, also have been investigated numerically. The used three closure approaches are suitable for modeling strong mixing turbulence. The established model with higher order of magnitude of transported variable provides a possibility to elevate the computational precision. Based on the developed mathematical model, a CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) software, namely Q3drm1.0, was developed. This numerical tool focuses on the refined simulations of the steady and unsteady problems of flow and temperature/contaminant transports in complicated computational domains with the strong ability to deal with different discharge situations: side-discharge, point-source discharge/point-sink, and area-source discharge from the slope along bank. In this article, the study of side-discharge is presented only.