Element-free Galerkin method for numerical simulation of sediment transport equations on regular and irregular distribution of nodes

In this paper, the numerical simulation of the bed-load sediment transport using Element-Free Galerkin (EFG) method is presented. The governing equations of this model include shallow water equations for the hydraulic behaviour, Exner equation for morphodynamic variations, and Grass model for solid discharge. The governing equations are formulated for the coupled approach. The problem is solved using EFG meshfree method, in which the problem domain is represented by a set of arbitrarily distributed nodes; there is no need to use meshes, elements, or any other node connectivity information for field variable interpolation. The EFG method is based on moving least-squares (MLS) shape functions originated in scattered data fitting. Finally, to assess the ability and the efficiency of the EFG method, several benchmark examples on regular and irregular distribution of nodes are investigated and the results are compared with those of previously published works.