Author(s): Marcelo Xavier Ruiz Coello; Andrea Bottacin Busolin; Andrea Marion

Linked Author(s): Marcelo Xavier Ruiz Coello, Andrea Marion

Keywords: CFD; ELAM; Fish upstream migration; VSF; Vertical Slot Fishway

Abstract: River connectivity and fish migration paths have been strongly impacted by anthropogenic structures worldwide. To enhance fish migration, different designs have been proposed in the literature for fish passage structures. One of the most commonly used and studied designs is the vertical slot fishway. However, the wide variety of configurations and fish species makes it difficult to design fishways that work well across all cases. In this context, fish behavioral models can provide useful insights for design improvement. This study presents an application of an Eulerian Lagrangian Agent Based Model (ELAM) to the simulation of upstream fish migration in a vertical slot fishway. The model represents the fish as an agent that scans the Eulerian environment within a Sensory Query Distance (SQD) and processes information about the surrounding flow field according to a Gaussian distribution. The Agent Based Model (ABM) triggers two types of behavior: the first is a random walk accross the domain; the second type sees the fish swim upstream towards the most preferred cell within the SQD sphere. Fish response is driven by velocity, strain rate and turbulent kinetic energy. In addition, the model computes the work exerted by the fish in each time step, which provides a wider overview of the structure hydrodynamic effect on fish passing. The ABM considers fish body length and swimming capabilities such as induced swimming speed and critical swimming speed as main inputs. Good agreement is found between the model results and observations of upstream migration of silver carps (Hypophthalmichthys molitrix) in a vertical slot fishway presented by (Tan et al., 2018). References Tan, J., Tao, L., Gao, Z., Dai, H., Shi, X., 2018. Modeling Fish Movement Trajectories in Relation to Hydraulic Response Relationships in an Experimental Fishway. Water 10, 1511. https://doi.org/10.3390/w10111511

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3850/IAHR-39WC2521711920221006

Year: 2022