Models for cohesive sediments describing the evolution of the characteristics of particles

TL;DR

This paper develops a framework to model how sediment particle characteristics evolve during water transport, incorporating operators for relaxation, aggregation, and fragmentation, including a discrete numerical version.

Contribution

It introduces a novel modeling framework that accounts for sediment particle characteristics and their evolution, with new operators and a discrete numerical scheme.

Findings

Proposed operators model particle relaxation, aggregation, and fragmentation.

Framework accommodates particle characteristic evolution in sediment transport.

Discrete numerical version enables practical simulations.

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to set up a framework designed to take into account the characteristics of sediment particles when transported by water. Our protocol consists in describing the characteristics of sediment particles via an additional variable, and to build operators involving this new variable, modeling the evolution of the particle characteristics. Several such operators are proposed, some based on principles of relaxation toward an equilibrium, and others on a description of the particles' aggregation and fragmentation process. A discrete version of the latter is also offered for numerical settings.