Extensions of Shallow Water Equations

Extensions of Shallow Water Equations The subject of the thesis of Michael Hilden is the simulation of floods in urban areas. In case of strong rain events, water can flow out of the overloaded sewer system onto the street and damage the connected houses. The dependable simulation of water flow out of a manhole ("manhole") and over a curb ("curb") is crucial for the assessment of the flood risks. The incompressible 3D-Navier-Stokes Equations (3D-NSE) describe the free surface flow of water accurately, but require expensive computations. Therefore, the less CPU-intensive (factor ca.1/100) Shallow Water Equations (SWE) are usually applied in hydrology. They can be derived from 3D-NSE under the assumption of a hydrostatic pressure distribution via depth-integration and are applied successfully in particular to simulations of river flow processes. The SWE-computations of the flow problems "manhole" and "curb" differ to the 3D-NSE results. Thus, SWE need to be extended appropriately to give reliable forecasts for flood risks in urban areas within reduced computational efforts. These extensions are developed based on physical considerations not considered in the classical SWE. In one extension, a vortex layer on the ground is separated from the main flow representing its new bottom. In a further extension, the hydrostatic pressure distribution is corrected by additional terms due to approximations of vertical velocities and their interaction with the flow. These extensions increase the quality of the SWE results for these flow problems up to the quality level of the NSE results within a moderate increase of the CPU efforts.