Coastal pollutant transport modeling using smoothed particle hydrodynamics with diffusive flux

Abstract

The Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method is used in this paper to simulate the transport process of coastal pollutant by solving the two-dimensional (2D) depth averaged advection-diffusion equation in Lagrangian framework. To avoid directly discretizing the second-order derivatives, the diffusion terms are decomposed into two first-order derivatives by introducing the diffusive flux. To verify the proposed Lagrangian particle model, numerical experiments on four typical tests are performed, including the discontinuity, pure advection, grid anisotropy and large deforming flow. The high-resolution Total Variation Diminishing (TVD) scheme - the modified TVD Lax–Friedrichs method with Superbee limiter (MTVDLF-Superbee) - is also implemented for detailed comparison. The simulation results indicated that the present SPH-based model has better performance than MTVDLF-Superbee. In addition, the stability, convergence and efficiency of the proposed model are numerically analyzed. The Lagrangian particle model with diffusive flux gives satisfactory results with big time step and hence allows large Courant number, guaranteeing the computational efficiency.