Improved Multiphase Lagrangian Method for Simulating Sediment Transport in Dam-Break Flows

Abstract

In this study, sediment transport is considered as a typical multiphase flow in numerical simulation using a particle-based method and efforts are focused on reducing interface instability between phases. A new multiphase model, a particle-method based rheology model, and a higher order viscosity smoothening scheme are used in a particle-based method to reproduce the sediment transport. Model applications including open channel flow scouring on sand beds and various water-sediment dam break flows are simulated. This new particle-based multiphase method is able to predict both free surface and sediment profiles. Additionally, the simulated velocity distributions of water-sediment dam break flow also show good agreement with measured data, which has seldom been considered in previous studies using a particle-based method. The successful implementation of the sediment transport simulation confirms the strong capability of this particle-based Lagrangian method for predicting multiphase flow and provides an alternative numerical tool in sediment transport study.