sedFoam: A 3D two-phase flow numerical model for sediment transport - application on scour

A three-dimensional two-phase flow solver, sedFoam, is presented for sediment transport applications. The solver is extended upon twoPhaseEulerFoam available in the 2.1.0 release of the open-source CFD toolbox OpenFOAM. In this approach the sediment phase is modeled as a continuum, and constitutive laws have to be prescribed for the sediment stresses. In the proposed solver, two different inter-granular stress models are implemented: the kinetic theory of granular flows and the dense granular flow rheology mu(I). For the fluid stress, laminar or turbulent flow regimes can be simulated and three different turbulence models are available for sediment transport: a simple mixing length model (one-dimensional configuration only), a k-epsilon and a k-omega model. The numerical implementation is first demonstrated by one validation test case, laminar bed-load. 2D application is then investigated to illustrate the capabilities of sedFoam to deal with complex turbulent sediment transport problems with different combinations of inter-granular stress and turbulence models. The source code and tutorial cases are disseminated at https://bitbucket.org/sedfoam/sedfoam and the documentation together with tutorials description can be found at http://servforge.legi.grenoble-inp.fr/pub/soft-sedfoam/