Water entrainment due to spillway surface jets

Strong flow entrainment has been observed downstream of spillways constructed with flow deflectors. This water entrainment has important environmental and ecological impacts because it improves the mixing of powerhouse and spillway flows, but may negatively impact fish migration or create adverse flow conditions.

Most studies found in the literature attempt to explain this entrainment with turbulent mixing. Both reduced-scale hydraulic models and single-phase, isotropic RANS models grossly under-predict the degree of entrainment observed in prototypes. In this paper, an anisotropic model that accounts for the bubble volume fraction and attenuation of the normal velocity fluctuations at the free surface is presented. The model adequately predicts the main mechanisms causing water entrainment and compares well against experimental data for a round surface jet and for Brownlee Dam at model scale. It is shown that appropriate entrainment can only be captured if the turbulence anisotropy and the two-phase nature of the flow are modelled.