A hydrodynamic/sediment model for simulating bedload sediment in the river

Abstract

    This paper proposes a hydrodynamic/sediment model for simulating bedload sediment through a river section. Firstly, flow characteristics such as depth-averaged velocity were obtained by solving the governing equation, which is derived from the Reynolds equations and allows for taking into account the gravity, bed shear stress, turbulent diffusion force and secondary flow in calculations. Four criteria (i.e. root mean square error, mean absolute error, Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency, and correlation coefficient) were used to access the quality of computed results, revealing that a good agreement between simulations and observations was obtained at the studied river section. Secondly, nine relations for determining bedload sediment transport rate and bedload sediment discharge were considered and compared to identify suitable ones. The results showed that the relation proposed by Camenen and Larson (2005) proved to be well adopted, providing even better results than the others. Finally, future modeling efforts and wide-ranging applications of the model were discussed.