Advances in sediment transport modelling

A detailed description of how recently-developed sediment dynamics formulations are incorporated into the United States Environmental Protection Agency's Environmental Fluid Dynamics Code is presented. The new approach is an extension of previous models and accounts for multiple sediment size classes, has a unified treatment of suspended load and bedload, and appropriately replicates bed armouring. The resulting flow, transport, and sediment dynamics model is an improvement to previous models because it may directly incorporate site-specific data, while maintaining a physically consistent, unified treatment of bedload and suspended load. Experimental data from a noncohesive sediment erosion experiment in a straight channel help validate the numerical model. In this simulation, unknown parameters representing the active layer thickness and the erosion rates of the two largest sediment size classes when they are newly deposited are identified from the available data.