<p>Hydraulic Roughness and Flow Resistance in a Subglacial Conduit
Abstract
The hydraulic roughness significantly affects the flow resistance in real subglacial conduits, but has been poorly understood. To address this knowledge gap, this paper first proposes a procedure to define and quantify the geometry roughness, and then relates such a geometry roughness to the hydraulic roughness based on a series of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The results indicate that by using the 2nd order structure function, the roughness field can be well quantified by the powers of the scaling-law, the vertical and horizontal length scales of the structure functions. The vertical length scale can be further chosen as the standard deviation of the roughness field σr. The friction factors calculated from either total drag force or the linear decreasing pressure agree very well with those calculated from traditional rough pipe theories when the equivalent hydraulic roughness height is corrected as ks = (1.1 ∼ 1.5)σr. This result means that the fully rough pipe resistance formula λ = [2 log(D0/2ks) + 1.74]-2, and the Moody diagram are still valid for the friction factor estimation in subglacial conduits when σr /D0<18% and ks/D0<22%. The results further show that when a proper hydraulic roughness is determined, the total flow resistance corresponding to the given hydraulic roughness height can be accurately modelled by using a rough wall function. This suggests that the flow resistance for the longer realistic subglacial conduits with large sinuosity and cross-sectional variations may be correctly predicted by CFD simulations. The results also show that the friction factors from CFD modeling are much larger than those determined from traditional rough pipe theories when σr /D0>20%.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFMEP43C1892C
- Keywords:
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- 0545 Modeling;
- COMPUTATIONAL GEOPHYSICS;
- 0560 Numerical solutions;
- COMPUTATIONAL GEOPHYSICS;
- 1815 Erosion;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1824 Geomorphology: general;
- HYDROLOGY