1. New PIC sediment particle concept
We have created an efficient and parallelized particle-based sediment transport model. For the hydrodynamic interaction, a particle-centric perspective is taken. For sediment particle resolving models, the most time consuming aspect is the particle-particle interaction, or the inter-particle stress. To circumvent this, we are offloading the inter-particle stress calculation to the Eulerian background mesh of the high-resolution model, that solves the fluid flow. There are several advantages of this approach: It is computationally efficient and it represents the actual physics realistically. Most importantly, it unifies the two concepts of sediment and soil modeling into one consistent particle-based approach.
2. Large Element representation
An important aspect of the particle-based sediment transport modeling, is the ability to represent larger rocks of more arbitrary shape. Those exist as part of coastal or riverine protection structures or as part of scour protections around the foundations of structures. These elements need to be treated discretely to resolve the collision physics and rotation in addition to the translatory motion.In the current project, the solid elements are represented through the direct forcing immersed boundary method, which is also used for 6DOF rigid body dynamics. The advantage of the method is that the Eulerian background mesh stays fixed and only the rigid body is moving. In extending this approach, multiple bodies can be represented. The large elements also interact with the smaller sediment particles in the sediment transport algorithm.
3. Large-Scale Hydrodynamics:
A new non-hydrostatic model has the capability to model phase-resolved waves, current and sediment transport. It combines shock absorbing properties and high-order discretization with excellent dispersion characteristics in a unique way. High-performance computing was a focus for the model development and testing. The model is connected to a continuum-based sediment transport algorithm for bedload and suspended sediment transport and will be applied to real world sediment transport simulations.
4. Multi-Scale Hydrodynamics:
In a simulation-based and data-driven engineering approach, open-access met-ocean data sets and open-source simulation tools are combined into a downscale numerical approach. It is used to propagate offshore met-ocean data to near-field wave physics from offshore to coastal waters, This approach enables workflow automation for large simulation sets that produce synthetic data used to the train machine learning algorithms for near-instantaneous coastal hydrodynamic event predictions at the identified hotspots.
5. Consistent Sediment Transport Algorithm across the hydrodynamic framework
On the larger scales, the continuum sediment transport algorithm will be used. The re-implemented version (available to all models of the hydrodynamic framework) has been thoroughly validated.
