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A simplified approach to address turbulence modulation in turbidity currents as a response to slope breaks and loss of lateral confinement

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Abstract

Turbidity currents traversing canyon-fan systems flow over bed slopes that decrease in the downstream direction. This slope decrease eventually causes turbidity currents to decelerate and enter a net-depositional mode. When the slope decrease is relatively rapid in the downstream direction, the turbidity current undergoes a concomitantly rapid and substantial transition. Similar conditions are found when turbidity currents debouch to fan systems with loss of lateral confinement. In this work a simplified approach to perform direct numerical simulation of continuous turbidity currents undergoing slope breaks and loss of lateral confinement is presented and applied to study turbulence modulation in the flow. The presence of settling sediment particles breaks the top–bottom symmetry of the flow, with a tendency to self-stratify. This self-stratification damps turbulence, particularly near the bottom wall, affecting substantially the flow’s ability to transport sediment in suspension. This work reports results on two different situations: turbidity currents driven by fine and coarser sediment flowing through a decreasing slope. In the case of fine sediment, after the reduction in the slope of the channel, the flow remains turbulent with only a modest influence on turbulence statistics. In the case of coarse sediments, after the change in slope, turbulence is totally suppressed.

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Acknowledgments

Mariano I. Cantero gratefully acknowledges the support from CONICET, CNEA and ANPCyT through PICT-2010-2459. We gratefully acknowledge the support from Shell International Exploration and Production and from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The participation of Gary Parker in this research was made possible by the National Center for Earth Surface Dynamics (NCED), a Science and Technology Center funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. S. Balachandar acknowledges support from National Science Foundation through the Grants OCE-1131016 and OISE-0968313.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centro Atómico Bariloche and Instituto Balseiro, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET) and Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica (CNEA), San Carlos de Bariloche, Río Negro, Argentina

    Mariano I. Cantero

  2. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    S. Balachandar

  3. Shell International Exploration and Production, Houston, TX, USA

    Alessandro Cantelli

  4. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Department of Geology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA

    Gary Parker

Authors
  1. Mariano I. Cantero
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  2. S. Balachandar
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  3. Alessandro Cantelli
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  4. Gary Parker
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Correspondence to Mariano I. Cantero.

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Cantero, M.I., Balachandar, S., Cantelli, A. et al. A simplified approach to address turbulence modulation in turbidity currents as a response to slope breaks and loss of lateral confinement. Environ Fluid Mech 14, 371–385 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10652-013-9302-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10652-013-9302-7

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