Application of Building Cube Method to Reproduce High-Resolution Hydrodynamics of a Dredged Borrow Pit in Osaka Bay, Japan

Abstract

AbstractOsaka Bay is a semi-enclosed water body suffering from water quality deterioration caused by numerous borrow pits being excavated during the era of the industrial revolution. To mitigate such conditions, backfilling is under consideration, and performance assessment of backfilling requires accurate numerical simulations of hydrodynamics. However, it is challenging to reproduce the hydrodynamics in a borrow pit due to its smaller size, and a coarse-resolution simulation is not enough to accurately capture bathymetry as well as the flow characteristics on a spatial scale. In this study, a non-hydrostatic 3-D hydrodynamic model is successfully used to accurately reproduce the hydrodynamics on both coarse and high-resolution mesh configurations. The advantage of this modeling framework is the inclusion of the building cube method that can locally modify the uniform structural grid to a part of the full simulation domain. This capability made this model quite handy and less time-consuming when it comes to high-resolution simulations focusing on small-scale barrow pits.