Proceedings of the 2023 Mississippi Water Resources Conference

Year: 2023 Authors: Zhang Y., Al-Hamdan M., Bingner R., Wren D.

The Sediment transport, defined as sediment driven by water and moving in water, is one of the most important processes when studying morphological and environmental problems. Sediment transport may result in sediment deposition in lakes, reservoirs and coastal wetlands; erosions along riverbanks, coastal lines, and at downstream of dams; local scour downstream of hydraulic structures; gully erosion in agricultural lands; channel evolution; adsorption/de-adsorption and resuspension, etc. In addition to conventional physical models, with the advancement of computer technology and numerical methods, numerical models have become powerful tools to study sediment transport in water bodies such as rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and coastlines. This paper presents the development of a two-dimensional hydrodynamic sediment transport model. The model is a single-phase, non-equilibrium, and non-uniform sediment transport model for unsteady turbulent flows, considering multiple sediment transport processes, such as deposition, erosion, transportation, and bed sorting. The governing equations for the flow and the sediment transport are discretized on an unstructured hybrid mesh system consisting of triangle and quadrilateral cells, which is more suitable for geometrically complex domains with higher adaptivity compared to the structured mesh system. Selected examples and applications will be used to demonstrate and validate the newly-developed sediment transport model