A Design for Vortex Suppression Downstream of a Submerged Gate

Interaction of recirculating and mean flow downstream of a submerged gate may form significant vortex structures, which may affect the stability of the gate. Although these flow structures that appear in submerged hydraulic jumps received considerable attention in the literature, relatively less work was devoted to the analysis and suppression of the vortex structures downstream of a submerged gate. In this work, internal flow structure and vortex dynamics around a submerged gate were investigated through laboratory tests and large-eddy simulation (LES) using computational fluid dynamics (CFD). It is shown that numerical results obtained for mean velocity field are in good agreement with the experimental measurements. A helical vortex pair connected with a horseshoe vortex system was identified within the roller region using high-resolution numerical simulations. Damping performance of different types of anti-vortex elements placed on the downstream face of the gate are evaluated based on numerical studies. It is shown that the horizontal porous baffle mounted at an elevation below the free surface reduced the vortex magnitudes in the roller region by 26.8%. With the implementation of the proposed vortex breaker, lift forces acting on the gate lip were reduced by 9.4% and drag forces acting on the downstream face of the gate were reduced by 8.6%. Finally, in this study, we assess the performance of the vortex breaker under different flow conditions.