Nederlands
Fast solvers for the stationary shallow water equations

Femke Kessels

Site of the project:
VORtech Computing
Martinus Nijhofflaan 2/20
2624 ES Delft

start of the project: October 2006

In January 2007 the Interim Thesis has been appeared and a presentation has been given.

The Master project has been finished in June 2007 by the completion of the Masters Thesis and a final presentation has been given. For working address etc. we refer to our alumnipage.

Summary of the master project:
Watermanagement is very important in a densely populated country with many rivers like the Netherlands. Maintainance and improvement of dykes, riverbeds etc. needs constant attention. In the design of these dykes and riverbeds software is used to predict the water flow and levels.

Rijkswaterstaat is a Dutch governemental institute that is engaged in such projects. VORtech Computing developes software that is used to do the necessary computations. This project is conducted at VORtech, which is an engineering and software company with a lot of mathematical expertise.

WAQUA is a software package that has been developed by Rijkswaterstaat and other companies to predict flows of rivers, seas and oceans. WAQUA uses the two dimensional shallow water equations to compute the flow velocity and water level and its development over time very accurately. One of the major drawbacks of WAQUA is the large amount of time it takes to find a solution. This is especially disadvantageous when one only wants to know the stationary solution and is not interested in very accurate time dependent results.

For this purpose QuickFlow was developed. QuickFlow is a program that is intended to solve the shallow water equations for application to rivers in the Netherlands. Its purpose is to quickly find the new steady state solution after an intervention like rising a dyke or a change in the level or structure of the bottom.

At this moment QuickFlow can find solutions that look pretty much like the WAQUA-solution for relatively easy problems, such as a small part of a river with a simple geometry. There are some problems, however, with more complex geometries, especially when parts of the river bed become dry. This report investigates these problems.

Satellite picture of the river part that is modelled in the Lek model and its surroundings



Lek, stationary solution computed by QuickFlow



Contact information: Kees Vuik

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