Author(s): Michele La Rocca; Mario Morganti; Matteo Sbarigia; Allen Bateman Pinzon
Linked Author(s): Allen Bateman Pinzón, Michele La Rocca
Keywords: No Keywords
Abstract: In this paper, a numerical and experimental study on gravity currents is presented. Such currents are generated in a rectangular tank, whose bottom is characterised by different roughness conditions, by the contact of fluid bodies with different densities. The lock-exchange configuration is considered: i. e. the instantaneous release of a dense body of liquid (whose density is ρ1) into a lighter one, whose density is ρ2, with ρ1 >ρ2 is realised. By using an image acquisition system, it is possible to record the time evolution of the dense wave front, while two laser sensors give the instantaneous thickness of the dense layer in two different points. Numerical modelling is based on the shallow water and immiscibility hypothesis. The shallow water hypothesis makes sense due to the small value of the ratio between vertical and horizontal characteristic lengths of the gravity current. The immiscibility hypothesis makes sense as the Richardson number of the considered runs is sufficiently high. The comparison between numerical and experimental results is encouraging and shows that the shallow water modelling is an useful predictive tool from the technical point of view.
Year: 2007