Numerical Modelling of Variable Density Shallow Water Flows with Friction Term

Abstract

AbstractIn this study, we focus on the modelling of coupled systems of shallow water flows and solute transport with source terms due to variable topography and friction effect. Our aim is to propose efficient and accurate numerical techniques for modelling these systems using unstructured triangular grids. We used a Riemann-solver free method for the hyperbolic shallow water system and a suitable discretization technique for the bottom topography. The friction source term is discretized using the techniques proposed by (Xia and Liang in Adv Water Resour 117:87–97, 2018) [19]. Our approach performs very well for stationary flow in the presence of variable topography, and it is well-balanced for the concentration in the presence of wet and dry zones. In our techniques, we used linear piecewise reconstructions for the variables of the coupled system. The proposed method is well-balanced, and we prove that it exactly preserves the nontrivial steady-state solutions of the coupled system. Numerical experiments are carried out to validate the performance and robustness of the proposed numerical method. Our numerical results show that the method is stable, well-balanced and accurate to model the coupled systems of shallow water flows and solute transport.