Low Flow Simulation of River Indus

Abstract

Numerical simulation now has an established place in the design process of any Water Resources engineering project. We used the software FLO-2D to simulate the flow in River Indus reach downstream Ghazi Barrage when it carries small discharges. As we all know, after the construction of the Ghazi-Barotha Hydro Power Project (GBHPP), Indus River receives minimal flows and there are genuine environmental concerns regarding flow quantity sufficient to sustain the flora and fauna in the river. The World Bank asked the WAPDA to have a numerical simulation performed of the above-cited reach to address environmental concerns. The WAPDA collected the cross-sectional data which formed the building block of our work. The challenge before us was to try to simulate the very complex pattern of river flow in which it flows in number of creeks. Number of simulations was run to model the same