Simulation of sediment-laden flow by depth-averaged model based on unstructured collocated grid

The 2-D depth-averaged mathematical model for sediment-laden flows has been widely used in river control and other related engineering problems, and now it is usually solved on structured grids. Since the natural river is usually very complicated in plane boundary, and unstructured grids are more attractive in solving the problems with complicated domains, the following questions about solving 2-D depth-averaged model were discussed in this article: (1) a modified Bowyer algorithm was suggested to generate unstructured grids for natural rivers, (2) the Finite Volume Method (FVM) is employed to discretize the governing equations of the 2-D depth-averaged model and an implicit scheme was suggested with unstructured collocated grids, (3) the observed hydrological data of the Chenglingji Reach in the Yangtze River are used for verification of the presented method. It seems that the suggested numerical scheme works very well, and the simulation results of both hydraulic characteristics and river bed deformation are in good agreement with the observed ones.