Numerical solution by meshless method of a fully-coupled bed load and shallow water flows

Abstract

The one-dimensional shallow water equations (SWEs), coupled with bed load (Exner equation) were solved in this paper for the numerical simulation of the sediment transport problem. By using an efficient meshless method based on radial basis function (RBF) that approximates the unknown variables on a set of collocation nodes and Runge–Kutta fourth-order scheme to approximate the temporal derivative. Besides, the artificial viscosity to avoid oscillations, we implement the proposed numerical model of bedload and set up a series of numerical tests using various nontrivial solutions to confirm the efficiency of the suggested approaches. The numerical simulations demonstrate the accuracy, computational efficiency, and ability of the suggested numerical methods in solving the coupled Exner shallow water problem.