A Bingham Plastic Fluid Solver for Turbulent Flow of Dense Muddy Sediment Mixtures

Abstract

We have developed and tested a numerical model for turbulence resolving simulations of dense mud–water mixtures in oscillatory bottom boundary layers, based on a low Stokes number formulation of the two-phase equations. The resulting non-Boussinesq equation for the fluid momentum is coupled to a transport equation for the mud volumetric concentration, giving rise to a volume-averaged fluid velocity that is non-solenoidal, and the model was implemented as a new compressible flow solver. An oscillating pressure gradient force was implemented in the correction step of the standard semi-implicit method for pressure linked equations (SIMPLE), for consistency with the treatment of other volume forces (e.g., gravity). The flow solver was further coupled to a new library for Bingham plastic materials, in order to model the rheological properties of dense mud mixtures using empirically determined concentration-dependent yield stress and viscosity. We present three direct numerical simulation tests to validate the new MudMixtureFoam solver against previous numerical solutions and experimental data. The first considered steady flow of Bingham plastic fluid with uniform concentration around a sphere, with Bingham numbers ranging from 1 to 100 and Reynolds numbers ranging from 0.1 to 100. The second considered the development of turbulence in oscillatory bottom boundary layer flow, and showed the formation of an intermittently turbulent layer with peak velocity perturbations exceeding 10 percent of the freestream flow velocity and occurring at a distance from the bottom comparable to the Stokes boundary layer thickness. The third considered the effects of density stratification due to resuspended sediment on turbulence in oscillatory bottom boundary layer flow with a bulk Richardson number of 1×10−4 and a Stokes–Reynolds number of 1000, and showed the formation of a lutocline between 20 and 40 Stokes boundary layer depths. In all cases, the new solver produced excellent agreement with the previous results.