Sediment Micromechanics in Sheet Flows Induced by Asymmetric Waves: A CFD-DEM Study

Abstract: Understanding the sediment transport in oscillatory flows is essential to the investigation of the overall sediment budget for coastal regions. This overall budget is crucial for the prediction of the morphological change of coastline in engineering applications. Since the sediment transport in oscillatory flows is dense particle-laden flow, appropriate modeling of the particle interaction is critical. Although traditional two-fluid approaches have been applied to the study of sediment transport in oscillatory flows, the approaches do not resolve the interaction of the particles. Particle-resolved modeling of sediment transport in oscillatory flows and the study of micromechanics of sediment particles are still lacking. In this work, a parallel CFD-DEM solver that can resolve the inter-particle collision is applied to study the granular micromechanics of sediment particles in oscillatory flows. The results obtained from the CFD-DEM solver are validated by using the experimental data of coarse and medium sands. The comparison with experimental results suggests that the flow velocity, the sediment flux and the net sediment transport rate predicted by are satisfactory. Moreover, the micromechanic quantities of the sediment bed are presented in detail, including Voronoi concentration, coordination number, and particle interaction force. It is demonstrated that variation of these micromechanic quantities at different phases in the oscillatory cycle is significant, which is due to different responses of the sediment bed. To investigate the structural properties of the sediment bed, the correlation of the Voronoi volume fraction and coordination number are compared to the results from the fluidized bed simulations. The consistency in the comparison indicates the structural micromechanics of sediment transport and fluidized bed are similar despite the differences in flow patterns.