Approaches reproducing suspended sediment transport through vegetation

Abstract

Working as natural filter, well-designed vegetation schemes have been widely applied to improve the quality of water (Aiona, 2013; Stefanakis, 2015). Proper design, however, requires appropriate physics-based modelling of their filtering capacity. Several theoretical models predicting sediment transport in vegetated flow have been proposed: Baptist (2005); Yang and Nepf (2018); Wu et. al. (2021); Tseng and Tinoco (2021); Yagci and Strom (2022); Wang et. al. (2023). Some of them have been implemented in numerical tools (e.g. Caponi et al., 2022; Li et al., 2022) and in particular in Delft 3D (Deltares, 2014). However, they have been mostly designed and verified based on bedload processes, and their performance for suspended load should be further investigated.
This work compares different approaches on their ability to reproduce the effects of vegetation on suspended solids concentration in two-dimensional models built in Delft3D. The work focuses on emerging vegetation, represented as rigid cylinders, and sediment deposition. Comparisons are based on the ability to reproduce flume experiments available in the literature by analysing both flow field and sediment deposition results.