Light Particle Tracking Model for Simulating Bed Sediment Transport Load in River Areas

Abstract

In this work a fast computational particles tracer model is developed based on Particle-In-Cell method to estimate the sediment transport in the access zone of a river port area. To apply the particles tracer method, first it is necessary to calculate the hydrodynamic fields of the study zone to determine the velocity fields in the three directions. The particle transport is governed mainly by the velocity fields and the turbulent dispersion. The mechanisms of dispersion and resuspension of particles are based in stochastic models, which describes the movement through a probability function. The developed code was validated using two well known cases with a discrete transformation obtaining a max relative error around 4.8% in both cases. The simulations were carried out with 350,000 particles allowing us to determine under certain circumstances different hydrodynamic scenarios where the zones are susceptible to present erosion and siltation at the entrance of the port.