Experimental and Numerical Study on Impact of Double Layer Vegetation in Open Channel Flows

This paper studies the effects of different types and configurations of double layer vegetation on the flow of open channels. The vegetation is simulated through cylindrical dowels with a diameter of 6.35 mm and heights of 10 and 20 cm, which represent short and tall dowels, respectively. Profiles for instantaneous velocities were obtained by acoustic Doppler velocimetry (ADV) at different locations around vegetation with multiple staggered and linear formations. The experiment covers a wide range of sparse to dense vegetation configurations. Furthermore, different flow depths were selected to simulate fully submerged cases for short vegetation and to capture the inflection of velocity over the mixing region between short and tall dowels. The results reveal that the velocity profile is mostly uniform at the depth of short vegetation in different configurations with various densities. The velocity starts to increase in the region near the top edge of short vegetation, followed by a significant increase through the height of tall vegetation to the free surface. Generally, the flow velocity behind the vegetation layer is significantly smaller than that in free regions adjacent to short and tall vegetation. The overall idea of the present study was to simulate the same sets of vegetation configurations using a K-ϵ model with mesh sensitivity analysis to capture inflections over the short vegetation region. The experimental investigations with a numerical study were explored for double layer vegetation, which was corroborated and found to have good agreement for different vegetation configurations.