ABSTRACT:

The files presented in this resource are supplementary material for a manuscript that has been submitted for publication. The aim of this manuscript is to present an introductory level application a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to open-channel flow. This is accomplished by deriving procedures for (1) using the Preissmann scheme to discretize the Saint-Venant equations, (2) expressing variables in the Saint-Venant equation, and (3) expressing boundary conditions. An algorithm for implementing the Preissmann scheme is presented in the manuscript, and the algorithm is applied using the tools provided in this resource, i.e., Wilkerson’s Preissmann-scheme-tool (WPST). Two versions of WPST are made available in this resource. One version runs in Microsoft Excel and is written in Visual Basic for Applications (WPST_In_VBA _S1). The second version is written run in GNU Octave (WPST_In_GNU_Octave_S2).

Moreover, validation results are derived by comparing predicted discharges and flow depths from (1) the tools provided in this resource and (2) the Hydrologic Engineering Center's River Analysis System software (i.e., USACE 2016a). Data generated in deriving validation results are provided in this resource via Generated_Datasets_S3.

WPST generated output includes predicted values of Q(x,t), y(x,t), and V(x,t). The code for WPST is written so that it can be followed by water resource professionals and students who are neither CFD specialists nor computer programmers. To keep the amount of code to a minimum, WPST has a limited number of features, e.g., the program only allows constant depth or discharge hydrographs to be specified. Both versions of WPST also read input from and write output to Microsoft Excel worksheets. The name of the input data worksheet is “InputData” and the name of the output worksheet is user specified in InputData. Prompts are provided in InputData to solicit the input required for WPST to perform an analysis.