NUMERICAL SIMULATION OF SEDIMENT EROSION AND TRANSPORT USING CONSISTENT PARTICLE METHOD (CPM)

Abstract

This thesis expands the Consistent Particle Method (CPM) and develops the necessary models to simulate sediment erosion and transport in water flow. First, CPM is formulated to simulate turbidity current with the following three key contributions: (1) implementing a low-Reynold k-ɛ RANS turbulence model in CPM to account for turbulent flow, (2) proposing a CPM-upwind scheme to compute the convection term in sediment transport equation, and (3) demonstrating the better accuracy of CPM in computing sand diffusion than kernel-based particle methods. Next, CPM is further developed to the simulation of sediment erosion with two novelty aspects: (1) developing a new erosion model which is more consistent with experimental observation than existing methods, and (2) proposing a new erosion criterion for sediment particle which eliminates the mismatch of erosion rates between numerical simulation and experimental data. The proposed models and their implementation in CPM are validated through various theoretical and practical examples.