Design and Performance Verification of a Flow-Making System for Experimental Water Tanks Equipped with a Movable Underwater Shaking Table

In the design of an experimental water tank equipped with a movable underwater shaking table featuring a large travel range, numerous auxiliary devices must be installed beneath the tank, resulting in substantial occupation of the available space. In this context, the optimal design of the water-supply passage within the flow-making system has emerged as a key engineering challenge. To investigate the optimal design of the flow-making system for an experimental water tank equipped with a movable underwater shaking table, this study uses the construction of the experimental water tank at the National Facility for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NFEES) as a case study. Several candidate design schemes were proposed and evaluated using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to identify the optimal configuration. Following the selection of the flow circulation scheme, a flow-guiding device was further designed at the tank outlet to improve the flow pattern within the water tank. The results demonstrate that the horizontal–vertical combined layout is the optimal configuration for the water-supply passage. For the flow-guiding device, the optimal design consists of guide vanes arranged parallel to the guiding slope with a vane angle of 0°, a total of five vanes, and a vane density of 1.0. The flow-making system was constructed based on the optimal design identified through numerical simulations, and full-section flow-making experiments were subsequently conducted in the completed water tank under various water depth conditions. The experimental results show good agreement with the numerical predictions, confirming the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed design. The findings of this study provide valuable guidance for the design and performance optimization of flow-making systems in experimental water tanks equipped with movable underwater shaking tables.