The design of hydraulic structures need the comprehension of water and structure interaction in terms of level, speed, sediment transport, among others. It is important for the hydraulic structure design to take into account the extreme events of flow, pressure and speed, therefore the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling becomes essential in the design stage. OpenFOAM is an open source software for the simulation of flow in steady and transient states; this software allows us the simulation of the hydraulic response from an specific requirement in laminar and turbulent flow conditions, flow velocity calculation, and determination of static and dynamic pressures.

With OpenFOAM the following design parameters can be achieved:

Structure freeboard
Maximum velocitiy for erosion control
Pressure distribution for funding and structural calculation.

This tutorial deals with the simulation of water intake at one side and 0.5m over the bottom of a main trapezoidal channel. The channel geometry and mesh have been done with the software Salome, which is open source as well. The model has more than 240000 tetrahedrons and was simulated for 4 seconds with output results each 0.05 seconds. Flow conditions were set up as turbulent flow.