OpenFOAM Hydraulic Validation Portfolio

Validated CFD case studies in hydraulic engineering using OpenFOAM v2512.

Project 1 — 2D Ogee Spillway (USBR DSD Fig. 9-23)

Validation of interFoam for steady free-surface discharge prediction over a WES standard ogee spillway against the USBR Design of Small Dams design coefficient.

Result: C_d = 2.107, error 3.35% vs USBR target of 2.180. Three-mesh grid sensitivity study confirms convergence within 0.4% spread.

Methodology: OpenFOAM v2512 interFoam, k-ω SST RAS, multi-block structured mesh with polyLine WES profile, 41,000 hex cells, custom codedFixedValue inlet boundary conditions (Q-ramp on velocity, prescribed phase distribution), 16-rank MPI parallel via scotch decomposition.

See project1_spillway/Project1_Spillway_Report.md for full report.

Project 1 deliverables

• Project1_Spillway_Report.md — 3-page validation report
• figures/fig1_mesh.png — multi-block mesh structure
• figures/fig2_field.png — alpha.water field at t = 30 s
• figures/fig3_freesurface.png — free-surface profile vs WES geometry
• figures/summary.png — composite summary figure
• spillway_animation.mp4 — 30-second flow development

Hardware

AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX (16 physical cores), 32 GB DDR5, OpenFOAM v2512 on Ubuntu. Wall time ~5 minutes per case on 16 MPI ranks.

Project 2 — Coming soon

2D dam break with downstream obstacle, dual-metric validation against Koshizuka & Oka (1996) and Lobovský et al. (2014).