Influence of Erodible Beds on Shallow Water Hydrodynamics during Flood Events

• Main Authors: David Santillán, Luis Cueto-Felgueroso, Alvaro Sordo-Ward, Luis Garrote
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-11-01
• Series: Water
• Subjects: hydraulic engineering; open channel flow; computational hydraulics; mobile bed; erosion
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4441/12/12/3340

Flooding has become the most common environmental hazard, causing casualties and severe economic losses. Mathematical models are a useful tool for flood control, and current computational resources let us simulate flood events with two-dimensional (2D) approaches. An open question is whether bed erosion must be accounted for when it comes to simulating flood events. In this paper we answer this question through numerical simulations using the 2D depth-averaged shallow-water equations. We analyze the effect of mobile beds on the flow patterns during flood events. We focus on channel confluences where water flow and sediment mobilization have a marked 2D behavior. We validate our numerical simulations with laboratory experiments of erodible beds with satisfactory results. Moreover, our sensitivity analysis indicates that the bed roughness model has a great influence on the simulated erosion and deposition patterns. We simulate the sediment transport and its influence on the water flow in a real river confluence during flood events. Our simulations show that the erosion and deposition processes play an important role on the water depth and flow velocity patterns. Accounting for the mobile bed leads to smoother water depth and velocity fields, as abrupt fields for the non-erodible model emerge from the irregular bed topography. Our study highlights the importance of accounting for erosion in the simulation of flood events, and the impact on the water depth and velocity fields.