Interfacial erosion: A three-dimensional numerical model

The aim of this study was to develop a numerical model to simulate the surface erosion occurring at a fluid/soil interface subject to a flow process. We used a penalization procedure to compute flow around obstacles. A fictitious domain method allowed the use of fast and efficient finite volumes approximations on Cartesian meshes and avoided unstructured body-fitted meshes. The water/soil interface evolution was described with a Level Set function. Several numerical simulations confirmed the model's ability to predict the interfacial erosion of soils.