scholarly journals Sediment transport in the Schelde-estuary: A comparison between measurements, transport formula and numerical models

Author(s):  
Y Plancke ◽  
G Vos
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 600
Author(s):  
Hyun Dong Kim ◽  
Shin-ichi Aoki

When erosion occurs, sand beaches cannot maintain sufficient sand width, foreshore slopes become steeper due to frequent erosion effects, and beaches are trapped in a vicious cycle of vulnerability due to incident waves. Accordingly, beach nourishment can be used as a countermeasure to simultaneously minimize environmental impacts. However, beach nourishment is not a permanent solution and requires periodic renourishment after several years. To address this problem, minimizing the period of renourishment is an economical alternative. In the present study, using the Tuvaluan coast with its cross-sectional gravel nourishment site, four different test cases were selected for the hydraulic model experiment aimed at discovering an effective nourishment strategy to determine effective alternative methods. Numerical simulations were performed to reproduce gravel nourishment; however, none of these models simultaneously simulated the sediment transport of gravel and sand. Thus, an artificial neural network, a deep learning model, was developed using hydraulic model experiments as training datasets to analyze the possibility of simultaneously accomplishing the sediment transport of sand and gravel and supplement the shortcomings of the numerical models.


1988 ◽  
Vol 1 (21) ◽  
pp. 141
Author(s):  
Todd L. Walton ◽  
Philip L.F. Liu ◽  
Edward B. Hands

This paper examines the effects of random and deterministic cycling of wave direction on the updrift beach planform adjacent to a jetty. Results provided using a simplified numerical model cast in dimensionless form indicate the importance of the time series of wave direction in determining design jetty length for a given net sediment transport. Continuous cycling of • wave direction leads to the expected analytical solution. Simplications in the numerical model used restrict the applications to small wave angles, no diffraction, no reflection of waves off structure, no refraction, and no sand bypassing at jetty. The concept can be extended to more sophisticated numerical models.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaveh Purkiani ◽  
Benjamin Gillard ◽  
André Paul ◽  
Matthias Haeckel ◽  
Sabine Haalboom ◽  
...  

Predictability of the dispersion of sediment plumes induced by potential deep-sea mining activities is still very limited due to operational limitations on in-situ observations required for a thorough validation and calibration of numerical models. Here we report on a plume dispersion experiment carried out in the German license area for the exploration of polymetallic nodules in the northeastern tropical Pacific Ocean in 4,200 m water depth. The dispersion of a sediment plume induced by a small-scale dredge experiment in April 2019 was investigated numerically by employing a sediment transport module coupled to a high-resolution hydrodynamic regional ocean model. Various aspects including sediment characteristics and ocean hydrodynamics were examined to obtain the best statistical agreement between sensor-based observations and model results. Results show that the model is capable of reproducing suspended sediment concentration and redeposition patterns observed during the dredge experiment. Due to a strong southward current during the dredging, the model predicts no sediment deposition and plume dispersion north of the dredging tracks. The sediment redeposition thickness reaches up to 9 mm directly next to the dredging tracks and 0.07 mm in about 320 m away from the dredging center. The model results suggest that seabed topography and variable sediment release heights above the seafloor cause significant changes especially for the low sedimentation pattern in the far-field area. Near-bottom mixing is expected to strongly influence vertical transport of suspended sediment.


Author(s):  
B R Rajasree ◽  
M C Deo

The estimation of shoreline change as well as sediment transport at a specified site can be reliably made with the help of corresponding numerical models that are run with the help of historical wave data generated using windwave models based on the input of past wind conditions. It is well known that the magnitude and behavior of historical wind and waves would not remain same in future as a result of the climate change induced by global warming. (Komar et al., 2010). In this light the present study attempts to understand what happens if future wind and waves are generated using regional climate models (RCMs) and the shoreline change and sediment transport is determined on that basis instead of historical wind and wave data. Toward this we have considered there different types of shorelines, namely (a) an uninterrupted coastal stretch, (b) the coast interrupted by an artificial structure and (c) the coast interrupted by natural features. This study goes beyond an earlier one (Rajasree et al., 2016) in which only case (a) was discussed and where coastal vulnerability was not assessed.


Water ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 1333
Author(s):  
Vahid Shoarinezhad ◽  
Silke Wieprecht ◽  
Stefan Haun

In curved channels, the flow characteristics, sediment transport mechanisms, and bed evolution are more complex than in straight channels, owing to the interaction between the centrifugal force and the pressure gradient, which results in the formation of secondary currents. Therefore, using an appropriate numerical model that considers this fully three-dimensional effect, and subsequently, the model calibration are substantial tasks for achieving reliable simulation results. The calibration of numerical models as a subjective approach can become challenging and highly time-consuming, especially for inexperienced modelers, due to dealing with a large number of input parameters with respect to hydraulics and sediment transport. Using optimization methods can notably facilitate and expedite the calibration procedure by reducing the user intervention, which results in a more objective selection of parameters. This study focuses on the application of four different optimization algorithms for calibration of a 3D morphodynamic numerical model of a curved channel. The performance of a local gradient-based method is compared with three global optimization algorithms in terms of accuracy and computational time (model runs). The outputs of the optimization methods demonstrate similar sets of calibrated parameters and almost the same degree of accuracy according to the achieved minimum of the objective function. Accordingly, the most efficient method concerning the number of model runs (i.e., local optimization method) is selected for further investigation by setting up additional numerical models using different sediment transport formulae and various discharge rates. The comparisons of bed topography changes in several longitudinal and cross-sections between the measured data and the results of the calibrated numerical models are presented. The outcomes show an acceptable degree of accuracy for the automatically calibrated models.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julio Garcia-Maribona ◽  
Javier L. Lara ◽  
Maria Maza ◽  
Iñigo J. Losada

<p>The evolution of the cross-shore beach profile is tightly related to the evolution of the coastline in both small and large time scales. Bathymetry changes in extreme maritime events can also have important effects on coastal infrastructures such as geotechnical failures of foundations or the modification of the incident wave conditions towards a more unfavourable situation.</p><p>The available strategies to study the evolution of beach profiles can be classified in analytical, physical and numerical modelling. Analytical solutions are fast, but too simplistic for many applications. Physical modelling provides trustworthy results and can be applied to a wide variety of configurations, however, they are costly and time-consuming compared to analytical strategies. Finally,  numerical approaches offer different balances between cost and precision depending on the particular model.</p><p>Some numerical models provide greater precision in the beach profile evolution, but incurring in a prohibitive computational cost for many applications. In contrast, the less expensive ones assume simplifications which do not allow to correctly reproduce significant phenomena of the near-shore hydrodynamics such as wave breaking or undertow currents, neither to predict important features of the beach profile like breaker bars.</p><p>In this work, a new numerical model is developed to reproduce the main features of the beach profile and hydrodynamics while maintaining an affordable computational cost. In addition, it is intended to reduce to the minimum the number of coefficients that the user has to provide to make the model more predictive.</p><p>The model consists of two main modules. Firstly, the already existing 2D RANS numerical model IH2VOF is used to compute the hydrodynamics. Secondly, the sediment transport model modifies the bathymetry according to the obtained hydrodynamics. The new bathymetry is then considered in the hydrodynamic model to account for it in the next time step.</p><p>The sediment transport module considers bedload and suspended transports separately. The former is obtained with empirical formulae. In the later,the distribution of sediment concentration in the domain is obtained by solving an advective-diffusive transport equation. Then, the sedimentation and erosion rates are obtained along the seabed.<br>Once these contributions are calculated, a sediment balance is performed in every seabed segment to determine the variation in its level.</p><p>With the previously described strategy, the resulting model is able to predict not only the seabed changes due to different wave conditions, but also the influence of this new bathymetry in the hydrodynamics, capturing features such as the generation of a breaker bar, displacement of the breaking point or variation of the run-up over the beach profile. To validate the model, the numerical results are compared to experimental data.</p><p>An important novelty of the present model is the computational effort required to perform the simulations, which is significantly smaller than the one associated to existing models able to reproduce the same phenomena.</p>


10.29007/h936 ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca De Serio ◽  
Elvira Armenio ◽  
Diana De Padova ◽  
Michele Mossa

Current monitoring programs in the nearshore region are necessary to allow a thorough knowledge of coastline erosion as well as diffusion and dispersion of polluting tracers. Collecting a large amount of data in widespread areas is challenging, because of technical and economic limitations, thus numerical models are often preferred to simulate the hydrodynamics and the transport of tracers in extended areas with the desired level of precision. To be accurate, models need to be calibrated and validated by high quality field measurements. Therefore, to examine current and tracer patterns in a basin, using data and numerical modelling in conjunction could be the best practice. The aim of the present work is: i) to provide some information on the typical and recurrent processes occurring in a target basin, by analyzing a set of current field data; ii) to reproduce the principal current patterns and derive information on the possible sediment transport fluxes in the basin by applying mathematical modelling. The site selected for this study is a semi enclosed coastal sea, in southern Italy. The obtained results successfully confirm the typical hydrodynamic behavior of the basin, and delineate areas which are more exposed to erosion.


Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (17) ◽  
pp. 2319
Author(s):  
Micheal Stone ◽  
Bommanna G. Krishnappan ◽  
Uldis Silins ◽  
Monica B. Emelko ◽  
Chris H. S. Williams ◽  
...  

Fine-grained cohesive sediment is the primary vector for nutrient and contaminant redistribution through aquatic systems and is a critical indicator of land disturbance. A critical limitation of most existing sediment transport models is that they assume that the transport characteristics of fine sediment can be described using the same approaches that are used for coarse-grained non-cohesive sediment, thereby ignoring the tendency of fine sediment to flocculate. Here, a modelling framework to simulate flow and fine sediment transport in the Crowsnest River, the Castle River, the Oldman River and the Oldman Reservoir after the 2003 Lost Creek wildfire in Alberta, Canada was developed and validated. It is the first to include explicit description of fine sediment deposition/erosion processes as a function of bed shear stress and the flocculation process. This framework integrates four existing numerical models: MOBED, RIVFLOC, RMA2 and RMA4 using river geometry, flow, fine suspended sediment characteristics and bathymetry data. Sediment concentration and particle size distributions computed by RIVFLOC were used as the upstream boundary condition for the reservoir dispersion model RMA4. The predicted particle size distributions and mass of fine river sediment deposited within various sections of the reservoir indicate that most of the fine sediment generated by the upstream disturbance deposits in the reservoir. Deposition patterns of sediment from wildfire-impacted landscapes were different than those from unburned landscapes because of differences in settling behaviour. These differences may lead to zones of relatively increased internal loading of phosphorus to reservoir water columns, thereby increasing the potential for algae proliferation. In light of the growing threats to water resources globally from wildfire, the generic framework described herein can be used to model propagation of fine river sediment and associated nutrients or contaminants to reservoirs under different flow conditions and land use scenarios. The framework is thereby a valuable tool to support decision making for water resources management and catchment planning.


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