Modeling sediment deposition from marine outfall jets

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a two-dimensional model to study the sediment deposition from marine outfall jets. The introduced unidirectional coupling (fluid–sediment) is an appropriate choice in the case of low-concentrated particle-laden jets such as municipal wastewater discharge, where the concentration of particles is small enough and does not affect the hydrodynamic development of the jet in the nearfield. The sedimentation model takes advantage of the preferential concentration phenomenon. The deposition criterion states that the deposition of sediments begins when the vertical component of the entrainment velocity becomes smaller than the settling velocity. Once the deposition process begins, it is controlled by the settling velocity, entrainment velocity, volume flux, and sediment concentration. The deposition along the jet trajectory is expressed by an ordinary differential equation coupled with the liquid phase equations. Experiments of Lane-Serff and Moran [Sedimentation from Buoyant jets. J Hyd Eng. 2005;131(3):166–174], Cuthbertson and Davies [Deposition from particle-laden, round, turbulent, horizontal, buoyant jets in stationary and coflowing receiving fluids. J Hydr Eng. 2008;134(4):390–402], and Lee [Mixing of horizontal sediment laden jets [dissertation]. Hong Kong: University of Hong Kong; 2010], chosen from bibliography, are used to validate the model. These experiments cover the cases of horizontal and inclined buoyant jets in stationary ambient, horizontal buoyant jets in co-flow current and nonbuoyant horizontal jets in stationary ambient. Good agreement between the experiments and the obtained simulations is revealed.

KEYWORDS:

• Turbulent flow
• suspended sediment
• mathematical models
• marine outfall jets
• deposition