High Resolution Numerical Simulation of Oscillatory Flow and Sediment Transport through Aquatic Vegetation: Using the Highly Scalable Higher- Order Incompressible Solver Nek5000

Rafael Tinoco Lopez, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Aquatic vegetation provides paramount ecosystem services: water-quality, bio-diversity, flood buffer, and coastal protection, playing a unique role in habitat creation. Flow-vegetation interactions have been extensively studied, but the impact on sediment is not yet fully understood, and much less is known for oscillatory flow. Direct Numerical Simulations and Large Eddy Simulations through various arrangements of idealized vegetation, based in experiments at the Ven Te Chow Hydrosystems Laboratory, will be conducted to investigate interactions between vegetation, flow, and sediment under oscillatory flows. These complex simulations have been conducted for cases up to ~296 million computational points, using up to 32,768 MPI ranks, requiring the use of Blue Waters. A highly scalable spectral element based incompressible Navier-Stokes solver, Nek5000, will be used, modeling sediment with both Lagrangian and Eulerian frame-works, leveraging previous results from numerical and experimental hydrodynamic studies to incorporate the interactions and feedbacks from sediment dynamics.