A Duality Method for Sediment Transport Based on a Modified Meyer-Peter & Müller Model

This article focuses on the simulation of the sediment transport by a fluid in contact with a sediment layer. This phenomena can be modelled by using a coupled model constituted by a hydrodynamical component, described by a shallow water system, and a morphodynamical one, which depends on a solid transport flux given by some empirical law. The solid transport discharge proposed by Meyer-Peter & Müller is one of the most popular but it has the inconvenient of not including pressure forces. Due to this, this formula produces numerical simulations that are not realistic in zones where gravity effects are relevant, e.g. advancing front of the sand layer. Moreover, the thickness of the sediment layer is not taken into account and, as a consequence, mass conservation of sediment may fail. Fowler et al. proposed a generalization that takes into account gravity effects as well as the thickness of the sediment layer which is in better agreement with the physics of the problem. We propose to solve this system by using a path-conservative scheme for the hydrodynamical part and a duality method based on Bermúdez-Moreno algorithm for the morphodynamical component.