TUFLOW Innovation River Flow 2020

River Flow 2020 was scheduled to take place on the 7^th-10th July 2020 in the historic city of Delft in The Netherlands.  The conference is the 10^th international conference on Fluvial Hydraulics and is run on behalf of the International Association for Hydro-Environment Engineering and Research with support from the Netherlands Centre for River Studies.  Off the back of significant research and development as part of the hotly-anticipated 2020 TUFLOW release, which has also seen the team shortlisted as one of Australia and New Zealand’s most innovative products, the TUFLOW team submitted two papers to RiverFlow 2020 which were peer-reviewed and accepted for publication in the proceedings. 

The first paper on the new sub-grid sampling procedure available within TUFLOW demonstrates the immense potential for the approach to effectively eliminate the sensitivity of a gridded solver such as TUFLOW to the grid orientation and grid size.  This has important applications in both the urban environment and for large scale whole catchment modelling.  The paper reports on significant benchmarking carried out as part of the research and development for a theoretical rectangular test as well as for flume scale measurements of a U-bend channel.  Real world applications were also provided.

The second paper presented outputs from research and development into a new turbulence model which was added to the TUFLOW 2020 release.  The new turbulence model demonstrated remarkable consistency across a range of scales from flume scale to real world river models.  This consistency limits the mesh-size sensitivity that is encountered when using other turbulence models and enables the use of a single turbulence model across a range of grid cell sizes within the model domain as is now possible suing the new TUFLOW Quadtree functionality.

With the Covid-19 situation, the River Flow 2020 conference is now hosted digitally with presentations available from the 6^th July to the 17^th July.  The two papers are available via our Library Publications section or the links below:

Mesh Orientation and Cell Size Sensitivity in 2D SWE Solvers, Kitts et al

Mesh-Size Insensitive Turbulence Modelling for the 2D Shallow Water Equations, Collecutt et al

Both papers demonstrate the significant amount of innovative research and development, testing and benchmarking that the TUFLOW team have undertaken to provide world leading hydraulic modelling software.