A Conservative Coupled Flow/Transport Model with Zero Mass Error

A fully conservative form applied to a coupled system of two-dimensional water flow and solute motion is presented. A cell-centred finite volume method based on Roe's approximate Riemann solver with unstructured grids is formulated. The bed slope source terms are discretized following an upwind approach and a semi-implicit treatment is used for the friction source terms. The centered discretization of the diffusion terms is in an implicit way. It is shown that this numerical technique reproduces almost exactly the steady state of still water and enables to achieve zero numerical errors in unsteady flow over configurations with strong variations on bed slope. The model ensures a global conservation and positive values of both water level and solute concentration. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the model in solute transport over real complex geometries.