Resumen: Culverts allow roads to safely traverse small streams or drainage ditches, and their proper design is critical to ensure a safe and reliable transportation network. A correct modelization of these hydraulic structures becomes crucial in the assessment of flood footprints or discharge peak estimation in a risk evaluation plan. The question of how to include culverts comes up frequently when assembling a hydraulic model that requires the presence of as many singular elements as possible. In this work, three different culvert integrations with the surface domain are studied and compared in the context of a 2D shallow water (SW) model. All of them are based on the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) formulation for the culvert discharge estimation but differ in complexity and in the interaction with the numerical model for surface flow, some of them as internal boundary conditions. Several steady and unsteady validation test cases are presented and the numerical results are compared with the predictions from HEC-RAS 1D and HY-8 software. The culvert area, shape and their sensitivity to the 2D computational mesh is also analyzed. Idioma: Inglés DOI: 10.2166/hydro.2020.025 Año: 2020 Publicado en: JOURNAL OF HYDROINFORMATICS 22, 5 (2020), 1093-1121 ISSN: 1464-7141 Factor impacto JCR: 2.376 (2020) Categ. JCR: COMPUTER SCIENCE, INTERDISCIPLINARY APPLICATIONS rank: 68 / 111 = 0.613 (2020) - Q3 - T2 Categ. JCR: WATER RESOURCES rank: 59 / 97 = 0.608 (2020) - Q3 - T2 Categ. JCR: ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES rank: 182 / 273 = 0.667 (2020) - Q3 - T3 Categ. JCR: ENGINEERING, CIVIL rank: 72 / 136 = 0.529 (2020) - Q3 - T2 Factor impacto SCIMAGO: 0.654 - Atmospheric Science (Q2) - Water Science and Technology (Q2) - Geotechnical Engineering and Engineering Geology (Q2) - Civil and Structural Engineering (Q2)