Abstract
The use of multiple-level non-uniform rectangular mesh in coupled flow and sediment transport modeling is preferred to achieve high accuracy in important region without increasing computational cost greatly. Here, a robust coupled hydrodynamic and non-equilibrium sediment transport model is developed on non-uniform rectangular mesh to simulate dam break flow over movable beds. The enhanced shallow water and sediment transport equations are adopted to consider the mass and momentum exchange between the flow phase and sediment phase. The flux at the interface is calculated by the positivity preserving central upwind scheme, which belongs to Godunov-type Riemann-problem-solver-free central schemes and is less expensive than other popular Riemann solvers while still capable of tracking wet/dry fronts accurately. The nonnegative water depth reconstruction method is used to achieve second-order accuracy in space. The model was first verified against two laboratory experiments of dam break flow over irregular fixed bed. Then the quantitative performance of the model was further investigated by comparing the computational results with measurement data of dam break flow over movable bed. The good agreements between the measurements and the numerical simulations are found for the flow depth, velocity and bed changes.
Highlights
Dam break flow is one of the research focuses in hydraulic engineering due to its tremendous destructive consequences
The laboratory experiment of dam break flow over triangular obstacle, which was performed in the Concerted Action on Dam-Break Modeling (CADAM) project [44] and had been widely used as an benchmark test by many researchers [14,21,36,45], is considered to validate the current model’s ability to simulate dam break flow with wet/dry front over fixed irregular bed
In order to validate the ability of the present model to deal with dam-break flow over movable bed, an experiment of dam-break flow in an erodible channel with a sudden enlargement conducted in the laboratory of Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) in Belgium [48,49], which had been used by many researchers [14,17,18,19,22,27] to test their models, is simulated here
Summary
Dam break flow is one of the research focuses in hydraulic engineering due to its tremendous destructive consequences. The central-upwind schemes are widely used in numerical models to simulate dam break flow over fixed [6,30] and movable bed [15,21,29,32], and satisfactory simulation results are achieved. Most of these existing models are based on uniform Cartesian grids or triangular mesh, and limited studies are dedicated to non-uniform rectangular or quadtree grids. The quantitative performance of the model has been investigated by comparing the results with measurement data in four dam break laboratory experiments
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