A NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION ON HYPERPYCNAL FLOW (original) (raw)

The Proceedings of the Coastal Sediments 2011, 2011

Abstract

ABSTRACT Episodic river flooding triggered by large rainfall may contribute a significant amount of terrestrial sediment deposits in the estuary/river mouth. Understanding the influence of these sediment deposits in the estuaries and continental shelves is important in predicting the changing coastal morphology and assessing future reclamation activities. In this study a two-dimensional-vertical (2DV) non-hydrostatic model solving Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations for salt-stratified fine sediment-laden flow is demonstrated to be capable of computing unsteady and inhomogeneous frontal processes. The numerical model predicts the main features of turbidity current with reversing buoyancy similar to that observed by Hurzeler et al. (1996) in a small laboratory flume. To study large-scale hyperpycnal flow events for a realistic setting, a 3D open-source hydrostatic coastal modeling system, FVCOM (The Unstructured Grid Finite Volume Coastal Ocean Model) is utilized to study hypopycnal and hyperpycnal plumes. Preliminary results of FVCOM for simulating Gaoping River plume (Taiwan) due to a moderate discharge event are shown. Future work will be focus on inter-comparisons between these two models to evaluate the importance of hydrostatic assumptions in determining the resulting plume dynamics and deposits.

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