Simulation of the Flow Behavior in the Storage Tank of a Hydropower Using OpenFOAM

The present research focused on the simulation of the storage tank of the Illuchi power plant, using OpenFOAM open source software. It began with photogrammetry by drone to survey the geometry of the water storage structure, then it was modeled by computer-aided design (CAD) software for export in STL file, thus being able to use the snappyHexMeshDict tool in the generation of the internal meshing of the flow in addition to the interFoam solver for incompressible fluids and the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) method to solve the equations of conservation of mass, energy and quantity of momentum in multiphase flow. By obtaining an optimal mesh of the geometry, it was possible to reproduce the turbulence with the k-ϵ RNG model, which approximately represented the phenomenon of turbulence in the tanks. ParaView and Gnuplot were used for the visualization and analysis of the results for their respective validation with experimental values. Finally, after 594 h of computer processing, global results of the reproduction of the phenomenon of the experimental part were obtained with an error of 5.44% in the numerical part for the Illuchi plant with respect to the measurement of flows at the outlets of the pressure pipes, obtaining flow characteristics that could be captured in the simulation. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.