During the past decade, a number of numerical methods have been proposed for the solution of turbulent water flows. Advancement in computer technology has resulted in dramatic increase in the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes by the engineering community. The advent of many new numerical schemes has enabled researchers to solve a wide variety of problems. Currently there are numerous general commercial programs for solving fluid mechanics problems on the international market. Among these is FLUENT/PreBFC package, which has been developed by FLUENT Inc, USA. This package has been installed in the Sun-workstation at the University of Liverpool by the Computer Services Department.

The present paper gives a summary of an extensive testing procedure which was implemented to investigate the suitability of the package in simulating various turbulent flows in the field of hydraulic engineering, both in two and three-dimensions. These include turbulent wall jets under shallow submergence, submerged offset jets, flow around piers and finally jet-forced water circulation in water-supply reservoirs. The results are compared with experimental results of previous research mainly of the Department of Civil Engineering. University of Liverpool, as well as other research establishments.

The FLUENT CFD model was, capable, in most cases, of producing predictions giving a good fit to the experimental results. When an accurate fit was not attained, the main features of the measured flow were still reproduced qualitatively: and the lack of correspondence was attributed to either inaccurate input data, numerical errors and of equal significance, experimental errors.

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