Numerical Investigation of the Influence of Water Jumping on the Local Scour beneath a Pipeline under Steady Flow

Rigid-lid approximation is usually used to replace the free surface in scour simulation. The influence of the rigid lid assumption on the prediction precision of scour hole in steady flow is studied in this paper. Firstly, a local scour model was constructed based on the open sources Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model OpenFOAM, where both the bed load and suspended load were considered. In the present model, the bed shear stress was calculated by the Newton shear stress formula, instead of the traditional calculation method with the assumption that the flow velocity in vertical direction complies with a logarithmic distribution. The Volume of Fluid (VOF) method was used to capture the free surface and a moving-mesh method was used to track the change of bed surface. Then, several experiments were chosen to validate the model, and the modeling results fitted well with the measured data. Lastly, the effect of the rigid lid assumption on surface elevation, bed shear stress and the profile of the scour hole in steady flow are studied. The result shows that the surface elevation suffers a drop above the pipeline, and the difference of surface elevation between the upstream and downstream increases with decreasing dimensionless depth. Compared with the free surface condition, the bed shear stress and scour hole depth computed with the rigid lid approximation were underestimated.