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Coupled flood and sediment transport modelling with adaptive mesh refinement

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Abstract

Coupled flood and sediment transport modelling in large-scale domains has for long been hindered by the high computational cost. Adaptive mesh refinement is one of the viable ways to solving this problem without degrading the accuracy. This goal can be accomplished through mesh adaptation, e.g., mesh coarsening and refining based on the dynamic regime of the flow and sediment transport along with bed evolution. However, previous studies in this regard have been limited to cases either without involving sediment transport or featuring flow-sediment-bed decoupling and the assumption of sediment transport capacity, which are not generally justified. Here, a coupled hydrodynamic and non-capacity sediment transport model is developed on adaptive non-uniform rectangular mesh. The proposed model is validated against experimental tests and numerical results based on the fixed meshes. It is demonstrated that the proposed model can properly capture shock waves, resolve the wetting/drying transition and reproduce morphological evolution. Compared with models based on the fixed meshes, the proposed model features great advantage in computational efficiency and holds promise for wide applications.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, China

    Wei Huang, ZhiXian Cao & Gareth Pender

  2. Institute for Infrastructure and Environment, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, EH14 4AS, UK

    ZhiXian Cao & Gareth Pender

  3. Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, China

    QingQuan Liu

  4. Geography & Environment, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK

    Paul Carling

Authors
  1. Wei Huang
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  2. ZhiXian Cao
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  3. Gareth Pender
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  4. QingQuan Liu
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  5. Paul Carling
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Correspondence to ZhiXian Cao.

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Huang, W., Cao, Z., Pender, G. et al. Coupled flood and sediment transport modelling with adaptive mesh refinement. Sci. China Technol. Sci. 58, 1425–1438 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-015-5880-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-015-5880-6

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