Numerical modelling of variable density shallow water flows with friction term

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel numerical method for accurately modeling coupled shallow water flows and solute transport on unstructured grids, effectively handling variable topography and friction effects while preserving steady states.

Contribution

It proposes a well-balanced, Riemann-solver free numerical technique that accurately captures steady states and handles wet/dry zones in coupled shallow water and solute transport systems.

Findings

Method is stable and accurate for coupled systems.

It preserves nontrivial steady states exactly.

Performs well with variable topography and friction effects.

Abstract

In this study, we focus on the modelling of coupled systems of shallow water flows and solute transport with source terms due to variable topography and friction effect. Our aim is to propose efficient and accurate numerical techniques for modelling these systems using unstructured triangular grids. We used a Riemann-solver free method for the hyperbolic shallow water system and a suitable discretization technique for the bottom topography. The friction source term is discretized using the techniques proposed by (Xia and Liang 2018). Our approach performs very well for stationary flow in the presence of variable topography, and it is well-balanced for the concentration in the presence of wet and dry zones. In our techniques, we used linear piecewise reconstructions for the variables of the coupled system. The proposed method is well-balanced, and we prove that it exactly preserves the nontrivial steady-state solutions of the coupled system. Numerical experiments are carried out to validate the performance and robustness of the proposed numerical method. Our numerical results show that the method is stable, well-balanced and accurate to model the coupled systems of shallow water flows and solute transport.