Civil Engineering Department, College of Engineering, Osmania University, Hyderabad.
The authors have made an investigation of the discharge of water over sharp crested convex curved weirs, with end contractions suppressed. The coefficient of discharge and discharge characteristics of curved weirs with different curvatures have been studied. These weirs were identical in body-wall dimensions and projected lengths but their curvatures and angles at the centre were varied; curvature was varied from 0.077 to 0.1142 and the angle of curvature was varied from 70° to 113°.
The investigation shows that the increase in curvature results in a decrease in the coefficient of discharge. Thus, as the curvature is increased, the total discharge increases but the discharge per unit length of the weir decreases.
A special feature of this paper is the authors’ empirical formula for computing the coefficient of discharge for curved weirs, which is in very close agreement with the experimental results. This formula directly gives the coefficient of discharge for a curved weir in terms of the coefficient of discharge for its projected straight weir for the same head—a relationship between the coefficient of dicharge of a straight weir and that of a curved weir being thus established.
The problem of flow over curved weirs was tackled in the past in the United States of America, in Germany and very recently in India, but the work was of a secondary nature and no attempt was made for arriving at a general solution of the problem, which is the aim of this paper.
