The final design of the water slide is still being worked on. The structural team has tweaked the geometry of the slide so that it is constructed out of ten uniform section pieces like the preformed pieces that are used in the design of waterslides in industry. The structural team has determined all of the loads and loading conditions that will inform the design, and they are now working on choosing columns and cantilever beams to extend from the columns to support the flume.
The hydraulic team has shifted gears since the last update. With the flow model fully setup in Ansys, we learned that Ansys does not have the capability to perform the functions that we wanted. To get around this obstacle, a new model is being developed in HEC-RAS. Since RAS does not have the capability of modeling two parts of the slide that cross over and under each other, the layout had to be shifted so that there were no overlapping sections. The picture below shows the geometry as it has been set up within RAS and the 85 different cross sections that were used to create it. The start of the slide had to be mirrored to the other direction to remove the figure 8 shape just for the purposes of creating the model. The flip was made at cross section 164.32.
