Three-dimensional Reverse Modeling and Hydraulic Analysis of the Intake Structure of Pumping Stations on Sediment-laden Rivers

For many pumping stations that draw water from sediment-laden rivers, the flow patterns in their intake structure are disordered due to sediment deposition, which seriously threatens the safe operation of projects. In order to accurately construct the complex and refined three-dimensional (3D) geometric model of the intake structure, and further explore the hydraulic characteristics of the water–sediment two-phase flow inside, this paper proposes a reverse modeling method and carries out numerical simulation. A typical forward intake structure in the arid region of Northwest China is selected as the research object. According to the point cloud data of the intake structure obtained by the 3D laser scanner, the curved surface models are rebuilt and imported into ICEM-CFD for improvement, thereby obtaining the 3D computational domain model of the actual intake structure; after lossless docking with FLUENT, the hydraulic characteristics are analyzed by applying the Realizable k - ε turbulence model coupled with the Mixture multiphase flow model considering interphase slip; finally, the reliability of the simulation is verified by in-situ flow measurements. Results demonstrate that the method can precisely reflect the actual geometric boundary and siltation of intake structure, and the numerical model can accurately identify the two-phase flow; the siltation improves the local flow field structure of the forebay to some extent, but cause the loss of the overall hydraulic performance of the intake structure. This study can provide a scientific reference for the geometric model construction and hydraulic analysis of intake structures with complex boundary and sediment deposition.