Performance of Perforated Wall for the Conditioning of the Flow in an Ocean Basin

This paper discusses the investigations conducted to develop the hydraulic design of the flow conditioner of the current generation system of LabOceano. The performance of different flow conditioner configurations were numerically investigated by means of computational fluid dynamics techniques. The numerical results were validated against experimental data, showing a good performance of the numerical model in predicting the main flow characteristics. It was observed that undesirable high angles of incidence of the flow occur upstream of the flow conditioner, indicating that the culvert geometry is not of much help to contribute to the conditioning of the flow. However, the results demonstrate that, in spite of such an adverse inflow conditions, the classical solution based on the perforated plate concept works very well.