CFD–DEM simulations of current-induced dune formation and morphological evolution

Understanding the fundamental mechanisms of sediment transport, particularly those during the formation and evolution of bedforms, is of critical scientific importance and has engineering relevance. Traditional approaches of sediment transport simulations heavily rely on empirical models, which are not able to capture the physics-rich, regime-dependent behaviors of the process. With the increase of available computational resources in the past decade, CFD–DEM (computational fluid dynamics–discrete element method) has emerged as a viable high-fidelity method for the study of sediment transport. However, a comprehensive, quantitative study of the generation and migration of different sediment bed patterns using CFD–DEM is still lacking. In this work, current-induced sediment transport problems in a wide range of regimes are simulated, including ‘flat bed in motion’, ‘small dune’, ‘vortex dune’ and suspended transport. Simulations are performed by using SediFoam, an open-source, massively parallel CFD–DEM solver developed by the authors. This is a general-purpose solver for particle-laden flows tailed for particle transport problems. Validation tests are performed to demonstrate the capability of CFD–DEM in the full range of sediment transport regimes. Comparison of simulation results with experimental and numerical benchmark data demonstrates the merits of CFD–DEM approach. In addition, the improvements of the present simulations over existing studies using CFD–DEM are presented. The present solver gives more accurate prediction of sediment transport rate by properly accounting for the influence of particle volume fraction on the fluid flow. In summary, this work demonstrates that CFD–DEM is a promising particle-resolving approach for probing the physics of current-induced sediment transport.