Simulation of aquatic canopies consisting of flexible vegetation
Aquatic ecosystems constitute a topic of high relevance due to their abundance and their various roles on different scales, ranging from the quality of drinking water taken from the local river to the large-scale impact on climate change. The interactions between the flow and the flexible plants in an aquatic canopy play a central role in hydraulics as well as transport of sediment, nutrients and pollutants. In previous investigations, the flexible vegetation elements were mainly approximated by rigid plates.
In the French-German project ESCaFlex funded by DFG and AWR the role of highly flexible blades is investigated by a joint experimental and numerical approach.
Snapshot from a simulation of a submerged canopy.
At ISM fundamental questions about the hydrodynamics of aquatic canopies are addressed by scale-resolving numerical simulations featuring flexible model plants. These investigations are enabled by a simulation code developed at the Chair of Fluid Mechanics. The flow is computed by a finite volume LES solver, resolving a wide range of turbulent vortex structures. The vegetation elements are modelled as thin, flexible ribbons. Their motion is determined using y dedicated structural solver which not only considers internal loads due to rigidity, damping, and inertia, but also fluid loads and the impact of possible collisions. This coupling between the structures and the flow is realized with an Immersed Boundary Method and an own semi-implicit fluid-structure-coupling scheme. The analysis of the data is carried out in cooperation with partners in Lyon who conduct experiments with similar configurations.
| Cooperation |
Fluid Mechanics and Acoustics Laboratory, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 |
| Project | ESCaFlex |
| Funding | DFG and ANR |
| Contact |
Dipl.-Ing. Bastian Löhrer |