A sediment transport theory based on distortion-free-boundary nonhomogeneous fluid flows

Abstract

Over the last 50 years several sediment transport models in coastal environments based on Shallow Water(SW) type models have been developed in the literature. The water flow over an abrupt moving topography quickly spatially variable becomes accelerated and strongly varied arising the turbulence (distortion). The acceleration and strong variation of the flow facilitate the transport of a large quantity of sediments present at the bottom while modifying it. The mathematical models based on SW type models widely used to describe the sediment transport phenomena do not account the distortion effects. Indeed, it is well-known that the SW models are derived from first order approximation of long wave theory. The acceleration and strong variation of the water flow near the bottom is due to the distortion of the horizontal velocity profile along the vertical direction. One can regard distortion as a combination of strain and rotation. The effect of the rotational component is to weaken the effect of the strain somewhat. In this work, we put in place a king theory of sediment transport derived from the second order approximation of long wave theory that can describe sediment transport processes in distortion-free-boundary nonhomogeneous fluid flows. The derived model accounts the distortion (fluctuation with great correlation lengths) that creates the turbulence. Moreover, the model differentiates the fluid velocity from sediment velocity (phase-lag) near the sediment bed. The proposed theory significantly reduces the modeling errors observed in several sediment transport models based on nonhomogeneous shallow water equations and has a great potential to increase the predictive power of sediment transport models in rivers, lakes, coastal flows, ocean basins and so on. The proposed theory improves several existing sediment transport theories recently developed in the literature and can be apply with some degree confidence.