Hydraulic design of a filling and emptying system for the new Royers Lock in the Port of Antwerp (Belgium).

---

Kristof Verelst, Jeroen Vercruysse, Tom De Mulder, Tom Fahner, Wim De Cock, Hans Pauwels

Friday 3 july 2015

14:30 - 14:45h at Amazon (level 1)

Themes: (T) Water engineering, (ST) River and coastal engineering

Parallel session: 16E. Engineering - River

---

An upgrade of the present Royers lock at the right bank of the tidal river Scheldt is planned by the Flemish administration and the Antwerp Port authorities. This implies a widening of the lock chamber towards 36 m and a lengthening towards 250 m. The new lock is designed for inland navigation. The design convoy consists of an ECMT class VIb ship and an ECMT class Vb ship. The selected filling and emptying system for the new lock is to a great extent a downscaled version of the one in the existing maritime locks in the Port of Antwerp, i.e. short bypass culverts in the lock heads. This paper wants to give an account of the hydraulic modelling efforts carried out during the design of this system. First, a 1D hydraulic network model is set up with the LOCKSIM software, based on head loss data from literature as well as from a similar model for the Berendrecht lock that was calibrated with field measurements. The 1D model is used to verify that the defined system meets the specified criteria on filling and empting time and water surface slopes, when use is made of an appropriate opening law of the vertical lifting valves in the culverts. Secondly, the complex 3D flow upstream, inside and downstream of the culvert outlets in the lock chamber is investigated by means of CFD simulations with the OpenFOAM software. These simulations show that the uniformity of the filling discharge into the lock chamber is acceptable. Additionally, the simulations confirm that the highest flow velocities in the lock chamber during filling are situated inside the deepened section of the lock chamber floor, which is favourable to minimize (direct impact) forces on ships moored close to the culvert outlets.