Particle resolved simulation of sediment transport by a hybrid parallel approach

Abstract

Sediment transport over an erodible sediment bed is studied by particle resolved simulations with a hybrid parallel approach. To overcome the challenges of load imbalance in the traditional domain decomposition method when encountering highly uneven distributions of particles in sediment transport, the parallel approach of Darmana et al. (2006) originally developed for point particle simulations is modified and implemented into particle resolved simulations. A novel memory optimization technique is proposed to reduce the memory requirement of the hybrid approach for spherical particles with equal size. The present hybrid parallel approach shows good scalability and high parallel efficiency in a challenging sediment transport test case with more than a million spherical particles. Our code is validated by several benchmark cases, and the results show good agreement with experimental and computational data in the literature. Furthermore, a turbulent flow over an erodible sediment bed is simulated. An extraction method is proposed to distinguish the saltating and rolling particles and extract impact and rebound information of the particle–mobile bed interaction. The probability distribution functions (PDF) of several saltation parameters such as velocity, angle, and spanwise angular velocity of impact and rebound events are presented. Splash functions are established for the particle–mobile bed interaction in the turbulent flow, which was rarely investigated in the experiments and is helpful to model the complex particle–bed interactions in turbulent flow.