Comparative study of sediment transport in Neckar River using 1D & 2D modeling tools (HEC-RAS and CCHE2D models).

Abstract
Hydraulic structures designs that will be built in the near future and also the planning of the maintenance duties of the existing facilities requires a prior assessment of their technical and economic feasibility. The main objective of these studies is to provide the better design so as to optimize the large amount of money and resources that the public administration or the managing companies have to invest in them. Based on this requirement, analysis of sediment transport in rivers and hydrological basins has become of central importance as it determines the "lifetime" of most of Civil Engineering projects. The area of study here chosen is Neckar River, a meandering river in Germany. A 2m resolution DEM is used to obtain the required geometrical inputs to feed the models. In case of the 1D-Model (HEC-RAS software is used), GIS-tools will be used to define the river stream, the river banks, the floodplain and the different cross sections. Once this is performed a geometry file containing all the necessary information of the river system will be imported to the model to start performing the unsteady flow simulations. On the other hand, a computational grid will be obtained from the DEM using the Mesh Generator tool included in the 2D model (CCHE2D) to be used. All the other data necessary to perform the hydrograph simulations (input hydrograph, water level at the downstream, field measures to calibrate the models ) is available and the necessary boundary conditions to compute the sediment transport rate is also known (bed load and suspended sediment concentration upstream). In order to understand the different results offered by the 1D and 2D models, a first comparison is made between the flow fields, especially focusing on the obtained water profiles. Besides, a detailed comparison on the river bed evolution is made in one of the meandering cross-sections. Keywords: Hydrodynamic, Sediment Transport, HEC-RAS, CCHE2D.

Comparative study of sediment transport in Neckar River using 1D & 2D modeling tools (HEC-RAS and CCHE2D models).
1. Motivation
Hydraulic structures designs that will be built in the near future and also the planning of the maintenance duties of the existing facilities requires a prior assessment of their technical and economic feasibility. The main objective of these studies is to provide the better design so as to optimize the large amount of money and resources that the public administration or the managing companies have to invest in them. Based on this requirement, analysis of sediment transport in rivers and hydrological basins has become of central importance as it determines the "lifetime" of most of our projects. However, Sediment transport is a complex phenomenon that mainly depends on two main variables: one that represents the characteristics of the basin and the river system, indicating the amount, nature and physical properties of the materials available for transport, and the other one is the capacity of hydraulic system to do so. This complexity makes the sediment transport problem impossible to solve just by the simple application of the theory of fluid mechanics. The presence of particles in the hydraulic flow constantly changes its behavior not only due to the turbulent flow but also often motivated by the presence of artificial elements such as bridge piles or other structures that make the flow even more unpredictable.

2. Objectives and scope of research

Due to the relevance that the study of sediment transport has acquired during the last years there are also several different software offering the possibility to perform sediment transport computations. However, the uncertainty of the phenomena that is under study makes that the previous knowledge of the user and his expertise over the problem to solve become as important as the accuracy of the numerical tool used to perform the calculations. This is the main reason to focus the study of sediment transport on the comparison of the results that 2 widely used free software among the hydraulic engineering modelers. In this study a comparison between two different dimensional approaches over Neckar River in Germany will be performed. The area of study here chosen is a meandering River. At a first sight, it may seem that the importance of the secondary flow in the meanders will make that the approach offered by the 2D model will be more accurate that the one offered by the one the model that only offers an average value of the velocity for every cross section.

At the end of study a comparison of both the hydrodynamic result and the sediment transport will be made and will be compared with measured data in order to discover if, for this case, a 2D approach is needed.

3. Research methodology
3.1 Available data The calculation will be performed in Neckar River. A 2m resolution DEM is available and all the required inputs to feed the models will be obtain from here. In case of the 1D-Model, GIS-tools will be used to define the river stream, the river banks, the floodplain and the different cross sections. Once this is performed a geometry file containing all the necessary information of the river system will be imported to the model to start performing the unsteady flow simulations. On the other hand, a computational grid will be obtained from the DEM using the Mesh Generator tool included in the 2D model to be used. All the other data necessary to perform the hydrograph simulations (input hydrograph, water level at the downstream, field measures to calibrate the models ) is available and the necessary boundary conditions to compute the sediment transport rate is also known (bed load and suspended sediment concentration upstream). 3.2 One-dimensional modeling case: HEC-RAS The 1D model chosen to perform the study is HEC-RAS, a well-known free software provided by the US Army Corp of Engineers. This software is widely used to perform steady and unsteady flow simulations as well as sediment transport or water quality calculations. In case of steady flow simulations the problem solves the 1-D energy equation, however in this study an unsteady simulation will be conducted. In that case the model solves the Full Saint-Venant Equations (continuity and momentum equation): (Eq. 1)

( In Eq. 1 is the flow area and

(Eq. 2)

is the rate of change in storage,

the difference between the inflow and the

outflow and

is the lateral inflow per unit length.

On the other hand in Eq. 2 surface slope and

is the rate of accumulation of momentum,

is the momentum flux,

is the water

is friction slope. The equations are solved by using an implicit finite differences scheme and

solved numerically using the Newton-Raphson iteration technique. In order to perform the sediment transport calculations HEC-RAS uses a hydrodynamic simplification: a quasiunsteady flow, approximating a continuous hydrograph with a series of discrete steady flow profiles. The sediment routines solve the sediment continuity equation also known as the Exner's equation: ( ) (Eq. 3)

This equation just shows that the change of sediment volume in a computation cell is equal to the difference between the inflowing and out flowing loads. In Eq. 3: is channel width, is channel elevation, is active layer porosity and is transported sediment load. This equation is solved at every control volume associated with every cross section. Capacity is just compared to the sediment supply entering the control volume. If capacity is greater than supply there is a sediment deficit which is satisfied by eroding bed sediments. If supply exceeds capacity there is a sediment settling causing accretion on the river bed. 3.3 Two-dimensional modeling case: CCHE2D The 2D model chosen to perform the study is CCHE2D, also a free-ware tool provided by the National Center for Computational Hydroscience and Engineering from The University of Mississippi. CCHE2D is a tool that performs simulation of free surface flows, sediment transport and morphological processes. In addition to the model a Mesh Generator is that allows the creation of the computational grid. The governing equations that are solved by the model are the following: ( ) ( ) (Eq. 4)

) ] )

(Eq. 5)

(Eq. 6)

Eq. 4 is the continuity equation where, and are the depth-integrated velocity in the x and y directions and is the water surface elevation. Eq. 5 and 6 are the momentum equations where the water depth the fluid density , the Coriolis parameter the depth integrated Reynold stresses ( ) and the stresses on the bed surface and are also involved. Reynolds stresses that appear in the Momentum equations are approximated based on Boussinesq's assumption: ( ) (Eq. 7)

In these equations Reynolds stresses depend on , eddy viscosity. CCHE2D model offers two different alternatives to compute eddy viscosity: the first one is the depth-integrated parabolic model where eddy viscosity is calculated by one formula and the other one is the two-dimensional model, where differential equations are introduced for the turbulent kinetic energy and the rate of dissipation of turbulent energy . In sediment transport calculations, the total volume of sediment is divided in to fractions: the suspended load and bed load along the vertical direction. The bed load transport is obtained by using van Rijn's Formula : [( In Van Rijn's formula ) ] is the shear stress parameter and (Eq. 8)

are parameters related with grain size,

is the

ratio of between the density of the sediment and the density of the fluid. On the other hand suspended sediment transport is obtained by solving the convection diffusion equation: [ ] [ ] (Eq. 9)

In Eq. 9 is the sediment concentration, , and are the depth-integrated velocities and convert the turbulence eddy viscosity to eddy diffusivity for sediment.

is a coefficient used to

All these Governing Equations are Partial Differential Equations and are solved by using a finite element method approach used to discretize the mathematical equation system.

4. Model preprocessing
4.1 One-dimensional modeling case: HEC-RAS As it was said before a DEM of the study area is available. MapWindow GIS is used in order to create the geometry file required by the 1D HEC-RAS model. The normal way of dealing with these step is to use ARC-GIS software as well as HEC-GEORAS software provided by the US Copr of Engineers, however, MapWindow was the chosen tool to use as it is an open-source software. The way of obtaining the Geometry file for the model is quite simple and straight forward. The streamline, the river banks, the flowpaths and the main cross-sections are defined. Then the GIS software obtains the elevation for every cross section intersecting all the defined shapefiles with the provided DEM. Once this cross sections and the main stream are digitized the geometry files is ready to be imported to HEC-RAS.

Figure 1: On the left side the DEM and the shapefiles defined in MapWindow GIS are shown. By intersecting these elements the Geometry file that can be seen on the right is imported to HEC-RAS.

Once these geometry file is imported into HEC-RAS the boundary conditions have to be defined. It is known that the water surface level at the outlet of the domain is 145.5m. Then the available hydrograph and granulometry curves are also defined into the model.

450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 0 20 40 60 80 100

Discharge (m3/s)

Time (h)
Figure 2: Discharge hydrograph used as upstream boundary condition.

Figure 3: Granulometric curve used to define the gradation of the river bed.

4.2 Two-dimensional modeling case: CCHE2D Similar steps as the defined before where followed in other to set the 2D model. However, in this case a MeshGenerator software, CCHE_MESH was used in order to create the computational grid.

Figure 4: Computational grid used in the CCHE2D model.

It has to be said that in these case the created grid was only constricted to the main channel because there is a limitation in the number of cells when working with a free-license of the model.

5. Obtained Results
5.1 One-dimensional modeling case: HEC-RAS After running the simulation different water surface profiles and evolution of the river bed is provided for every cross section. The following figures are just a example of how does the output of the model looks like. The results that are shown here correspond to the peak of the hydrograph that takes place 26h after the simulation begins.

Figure 5: Water Surface Elevation profile obtained 26 hours after the simulation started.

Figure 6: Evolution of the river bed after performing the simulation along the 100 hours that the input hydrograph lasts. The maximum erosion is observed at the upstream of the river reach.

5.2 Two-dimensional modeling case: CCHE2D The output offered by the 2D even its visualization can be easily used by the user-friendly interface provided by the software is harder to analyze properly.

While HEC-RAS was just offering a cross-section averaged result by using the 2D approach it is possible to obtain a result that seems closer to the phenomena that may take place in the real domain. A comparison of the two different results is shown in the following section. However, just to offer a quick idea about how the output results look like the following picture shows the evolution of the river bed along the event. As it can be seen the result provided by CCHE2 model is quite similar to the one offered by HEC-RAS. Both of model point out that the main changes in the river bed evolution take place at the upstream of the river reach. A further comparison between the results offered in one of the meandering cross sections will be made in the following section.

Figure 7: Evolution of the river bed after performing the simulation along the 100 hours that the input hydrograph lasts.

6. Comparison between models and conclusions

As is was said before, the main objective of the term project is to compare the results offered by the two different dimensional approaches so as to know if, in this particular case, the one-dimensional or the two-dimensional approaches are accurate enough to describe de sediment transport phenomena or if a fully 3D approach is needed. In order to understand the different results obtained, a first comparison is made between the flow fields, especially focusing on the obtained water profiles. As it can be seen in Figure 8 it seems that there is no big difference, at least when talking about the hydrodynamics, between the results offered by each simulation. On the other hand, a detailed comparison on the river bed evolution is made in one of the meandering crosssections, as it can be seen in Figure 9. That figure shows clearly the difference between one or other approach. While the 1D result is just offering a uniform variation of the river bed along the main channel the 2D model offers a result that seems to be closer to the reality. Thanks to the fact that the 2D model offers a different velocity profile along the cross section it is possible to observe that the evolution of the river bed is also different along the

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cross-section: deeper near the thalweg (where water velocity profile reaches a higher development) and smaller (in these case we see a little bit of accretion)To sum up, as it was previously mention it seems that if one is only interesting on having a rough idea about how the flow in the river then, a 1D approach can offer to the user an accurate result quite close to reality. This 1D, approach is even able to point out the areas where a higher evolution of the river bed can be expected. However, if there is a necessity of having a big understanding about the phenomena then a 2D approach can be useful to get closer to the real phenomena. Depending on the situation and the case of study the decision of using one or another approach should be also determined by the quality of the input data. If the data of the study area is not good enough using a higher dimensional model will not always lead to a better solution. Expertise of the user becomes then one of the main factors to decide which model should be used.

Figure 8: Comparison of the water elevation profiles when the peak of the hydrograph takes place.

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Figure 9: Comparison of the river bed evolution after 100 hours in the first meandering cross-section.

7. References
Cook, Aaron Christopher (2008). Comparison of one-dimensional HEC-RAS with two-dimensional FESWMS model in flood inundation mapping. Master's Thesis, Purdue University, Indiana. HEC-RAS 4.1 Hydraulic Reference Manual (2010) Yafei Jian and Sam S.Y. Wang (2001). CCHE2D: Two-dimensional Hydrodynamic and Sediment Transport Model For Unsteady Open Channel Flows Over Loose Bed. Technical Report.

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