Numerical simulation of velocity lateral distribution in meandering compound channels

Meandering has attracted the attention of scientists and engineers since a long time. In river bend, high variations of flow depth, velocity and shear stress across the river produce a spiral flow and hence, bank erosion in outer bank and sedimentation in inner bank. Such situation is very complicated in rivers with floodplains. In this condition, flood flow enters the floodplains and changes the direction of secondary flow because of momentum transfer between main channel and floodplains. In this paper, using a quasi-two dimensional mathematical model, the lateral distribution of velocity in overbank meandering rivers is simulated. This mathematical model combined with dimensionless relationships for secondary flow term is solved numerically in curvilinear system. The most important result of this research indicates that the maximum and minimum magnitudes of velocity are occurred in inner and outer banks, respectively, which is in the opposite sense with the flow structure at the inbank meandering channels. This finding agrees well with the experimental data in overbank meandering channels. Furthermore, the numerical results have higher accuracy compared with Ervine et. al. method. The mean relative error of proposed and Ervine et al. methods for predicting the main channel velocity are 6 and 10 percents, respectively.