Numerical investigation of sheet flow sediment transport

Details

Supervisors

Legat, Vincent ; Lambrechts, Jonathan

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil électromécanicien, à finalité spécialisée: mécatronique

Abstract

enThis thesis uses the immersed-granular solver MigFlow to study sediment transport. More specifically, we focus on the sheet flow regime, which is an intense bed load transport regime that occurs both in natural environments such as rivers and coastal areas and in industrial processes such as dredging and mining. The scope of this work is limited to 2D, flume-like experiments to assess the solver’s ability to reproduce the phenomenon and to investigate the internal layered structure and the scaling behavior of sheet flow. To achieve this, we first provide a review of the physics involved. A classical analytical description of inclined flows is presented, followed by a brief description of the physics of sediment transport and sheet flow. We next describe and parametrize the numerical experiments, after which the results are presented. Given the unresolved nature of the 2D solver, comparisons are qualitative but validate that the setup captures the main sheet flow behaviors. A number of tools specific to the problem were developed around migflow and are presented along with the results.