30/01/2025 - Matthias Renaud
Erosion due to scouring processes around hydraulic structures is a major issue for bridge safety. During the past century it has been the topic of numerous studies but its modelling is still a challenging issue and its accurate prediction remains poor. Numerical modelling offer a promising tool to help engineers prevent scour related failures and better take local erosion into account. However scour is a special kind of sediment transport problem which requires a locally fine scale resolution to properly capture the turbulent flow around the hydraulic work. Both the contraction of the flow and the turbulence due to the presence of an obstacle create additional shear stress on the sediment bed, putting sediment into motion. Various eddies are generated around the structure and if they are strong enough, sediments get suspended into the water column and are transported in the flow. The resolution of those local processes is not compatible with the variety of large scale sediment transport models used in engineering.
The ongoing development of a sediment transport and morphodynamics model based on the open source software OpenFOAM is presented. Different benchmarks for suspension, sediment deposition, scour caused by an horizontal jet, dune transport are used to validate each component of the model against either experimental results or analytical solutions.
