CMS-Flow:Variable D50

Under construction

The current release version of CMS-Flow (v3.75) is a single-size sediment transport model. In this model, the spatially variable D50 dataset is used in calculating a hiding and exposure correction to the critical bed shear stress. Future versions of CMS will include multiple-sized sediment transport in which the variable D50 will be used to estimate an initial grain size distribution and solve discrete number of sediment size classes and include bed sorting and gradation.

In many cases the bed material is dominated by a single sediment size with patches of other sediment sizes or materials (e.g. shell hash), which do not contribute significantly to morphology change at specific regions, but do modify the sediment transport through hiding and exposure. By assuming that the spatial distribution of the bed material composition is constant in time, the hiding and exposure can be included in a single-sized sediment transport model. This is done by means of a correction function for the critical shields parameter $\theta _{ck}=\xi _{k}\theta _{c50}$

where $\xi _{k}$ is the dimensionless hiding and exposure function, $\theta _{c50}$ is the critical Shields parameter of the median sediment grain size $d_{50}$ and $\theta _{ck}$ is the critical Shields parameter for the transport grain size $d_{k}$. In CMS a formula similar to that of Parker et al. (1995) and others is used given by $\xi _{k}=(d_{k}/d_{50})^{-m}$, where $m$ is an empirical hiding and exposure coefficient.