Study on the Best Depth of Stilling Basin with Shallow-Water Cushion

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report



The authors computationalyinvestigate the so-called "best-depth" of a stilling basin with a shallow water cushion i;e;. the depth at wich the water cushion is considered as shallow and its relation to incoming flows and energy dissipation, acting as a buffer. From a practical point of view, the presented research may be of some significance to stilling basin constructions, aim to dessipate the energy of the flow, and may provide some general guid lines. However, there are import matter regarding the manuscript that need to be taken care for which I state below.

(1) First of all the use of the English language should be improved. Long sentences should be shortened throughout the main text.

(2) The justification of this work is based othis work is based on ref. [6], an unpublished M.Sc. thesis. Are there other similar investigations in the international literature? Why is the problem under investigation important in hydraulics? What are the applications that a stilling basin (with a water cushion) is needed?

(3) An important observation from the presentation is that, the authors used a spesific length in the water cushion (1.2 m), but what about defferent lenghts? How is the lenght of the cushion affects the presented results and conclusions. This may need to be investigated computationaly as well. Further, what about  different inclination angles?  Do the results and conclusions still hold? The authors may want to elaborate in this as well.

(4) In the experimental and simulation tests how the different inlet patterns i.e. Froude numbers? The Froude number can be affected by many factors, flow speed, head losses, slope, depth etc.. Details should be given here as guidlines (experimentaly and computationaly).

(5) Computational details should be given: about the finite volume scheme used (which method and of what spatial order), the implicit time-marching scheme. It is not clear how the PISO algorithm is used, which is essentially the VOF method used to compute the free surface, in conjuction with the finite volume method. Again here boundary conditions should be detailed, following from (4) above. What does filtering meansin page 2, line 86 for the model equations?

(6) All notations used should be clearly indicated and explained e.g. what is d, L in the setups in Fig. 1. Different symbols should be used in Fig. 10 to distinguish plots in black and white printing.

(7) Section 3.4 & Conclusions contain the same material more or less. Please ammend accordingly.

In conclusion, the presented investigation may have some potential novelty and application but it needs better drafting and detailed explanations before considered for as possible publication.

Author Response

Dear editors/reviewers:

First of all, we would like to present our sincere gratitude to you for your constructive comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Study on the Best Depth of Stilling Basin with Shallow-Water Cushion” (ID:water-394133). Those comments are all valuable and significantly helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have checked the comments carefully and tried our best to revise our manuscript according to the comments, which we hope will meet with approval.

we sincerely appreciate you for your constructive advice, thank you

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

In the paper “Study on the Best Depth of Stilling Basin with Shallow-Water Cushion (SBSWC)” Li et al. compared the depth of stilling basin for different Froud numbers and estimated the best depth-over-length ratio, considering a shallow water cushion (i.e. 1/10 – 1/3 of the depth). The phenomena was modelled using Large Eddy Simulations (LED) and also experiments. In summary, the research is of interest but the presentations of the results can be improved.

Key suggestions/comments:

1.       The literature review is insufficient and should include information about the relevance of this topic or the applications.

2.       The verification of the mathematical model (Section 2.3) is insufficient. The verification between the experiment and the LED results should include performance statistics of the differences/similarities.

3.       The result section should be improved. For example, the designs of Figure 6 and Table 3 can be changed to increase readability.

Author Response

Dear editors/reviewers:

First of all, we would like to present our sincere gratitude to you for your constructive comments concerning our manuscript entitled “Study on the Best Depth of Stilling Basin with Shallow-Water Cushion” (ID:water-394133). Those comments are all valuable and significantly helpful for revising and improving our paper. We have checked the comments carefully and tried our best to revise our manuscript according to the comments, which we hope will meet with approval.

we sincerely appreciate you for your constructive advice, thank you.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have now ammended the manuscript according, to most of, my review comments and the presentation is easier to follow and understand.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript is improved although the background information and references should be expanded