Modelling sediment transport using a lightweight bed material

Details are given of a combined physical and numerical model study of sediment transport processes in a square harbour caused by tidal motion. The effects on bed level changes due to tidal currents and the configuration of the harbour entrance were investigated. A lightweight material called Cation Resin was used in this study to represent bed sediments in the laboratory experiments. This material enabled the erosion and deposition processes to be exaggerated within the model harbour, in which the magnitude of the flow velocities was relatively small. An unstructured mesh generation technique, namely a quad-tree grid, was incorporated into an existing two-dimensional depth-integrated numerical model to predict the transport of water quality constituents and sediment particle fluxes. The numerical model was further refined to include the prediction of bed level changes. Detailed comparisons between the numerical model predictions and the laboratory data were undertaken. It was found that the numerical model predictions and the laboratory measurements were in good agreement. It was also concluded that Cation Resin was an appropriate material to use for physical modelling of sediment transport processes in laboratory model studies.