Free Surface Analysis of Spillway Flow under Radial Gate by EFG-NE Method

The element-free Galerkin method (EFG) and the natural element method (NEM) are two well know methods in the computational mechanics and meshless methods. In this paper, a computational scheme using a variable domain and a fixed domain is presented based on coupling of EFG and NEM for analysis of two dimensional spillway flow under radial gate for the computation of the free surface profile and the flow rate of a 2D gravity fluid f low through a conduit and under a radial gate. The coupling between EFG and NE is achieved by using the natural element shape functions as the weight functions for the element free Galerkin method. In this method, contrary to EFG method, the imposition of the essential boundary conditions is straight forward and shape functions fulfill the Kronecker delta property. In this study, the fluid is assumed to be inviscid and incompressible. The validity of the proposed method is verified by comparing the results from EFG-NE simulation results with those obtained from finite element simulation and experimental results. It is concluded that the results obtained by EFG-NE method is in good agreement with those from FEM and experimental results. Therefore, the coupled EFG-NE method is capable to handle spillway flow simulation.