Two-dimensional numerical modeling of wood transport

Abstract

The transport of wood material in rivers has been the subject of various studies in recent years. Most research has focused on the ecological and geomorphologic role of wood, its recruitment processes and spatial distribution in streams. In this study, we focused on wood transport dynamics, and we have developed a numerical model to simulate wood transport coupled with a two-dimensional (2D) hydrodynamic model. For this purpose, wood drag forces were incorporated as additional source terms into the shallow water equations, which are solved together with wood transport by using the finite volume method. This new tool has been implemented as a computational module into ‘Iber’, a 2D hydraulic simulation software. The new module analyzes the initial motion threshold of wood based on the balance of forces involved in the wood's movement, and computes the position and velocity of differently shaped logs using a kinematic approach. The method also considers the interaction between the logs themselves and between the logs and the channel walls or boundaries. Flume experiments were used in a straight channel with obstructions to validate the model's capacity to accurately reproduce the movement of floating logs.