Vibrations limit the lifetime of sluice gates and can cause their collapse. Their failure can lead to flooding and damage the river environment. Thus, mitigating sluice gate vibrations is essential. High amplitude vibrations result due to the coupling of forces generated by unsteady flow and the sluice gate oscillation. The shedding of unsteady flow features forces the displacement of the sluice gate, which responds actively as a mass-spring-damper system. The motion of the sluice gate generates, in turn, unsteady flow features. If the frequency of the unsteady flow features is close to the eigenfrequency of the sluice gate, resonance occurs.

Only advanced numerical tools can predict the fluid-structure interaction reliably, because of the complex flow features and the challenge to model the eigenfrequency of real sluice gates. The license costs of commercial software are forbiddingly high for small enterprises to utilise such design tools. Hence, we develop a simulation procedure based on open-source software tools. As the first step, the generation flow induced structures is simulated.

The application of open-source software to simulate flow structures causing the vibrations is valuable for many small Austrian enterprises, e.g. in hydropower engineering. The newly developed tool can replace low-cost methods, which often lead to over-simplified or inadequate design solutions and thus, non-optimal performance.