Erosion/sediment transport with OpenFOAM: Which model to use?
 

Hey there :)

First of all, I hope this is the appropriate forum. From the descriptions provided here, I didn't find a more suitable sub-forum.

Now a little context to my question: I'm a master student and I'm preparing my thesis right now. The topic is a numerical simulation of propeller-induced erosion on river beds, which has to be conducted with OpenFOAM or foam-extend.
For this, I installed Xubuntu 16.04 on my laptop and compiled foam-extend 4.0. I did the three tutorials (cavity, plate with a hole and dam break), but apart from that I'm completely new to OF.
As typical for a master thesis, I only have a limited amount of time, so time-efficiency is one of my major concerns. Any advice on that aspect are welcome, if it's not "Don't use OpenFOAM then."

I looked into the specifications of four different models (or modules? Please correct my wording if necessary) that might be used for my simulation, which are the following:

1. SediFoam (available here on github), which provides a coupling between OF and LAMMPS
2. CFDEM (github link), which couples OF and LIGGGHTS (which is based on LAMMPS)
3. DPMFoam, of which I actually don't know whether it would work for my specific problem
4. and TwoPhaseEulerSedFoam (or just SedFoam) (github link)

The first two are couplings between CFD and DEM, and I guess that also applies to the third - or is that only DEM? The last one models the sediment as a highly viscous fluid, though I didn't even get the exact difference between that and just TwoPhaseEulerFoam.

Now my big questions are the following:

1. Does anyone of you already have experience with one or more of the models listed above? If so, what are your experiences? Issues, trouble? How easy to use are they? Any recommendations which ones to use or not to use, especially for someone new to OF and CFD in general?
2. I need to model three phases: solid particles (sediment), liquid (water) and gas (air). I didn't find any details on that in any of the manuals/documentations/descriptions. Does anyone know whether or not that works with one or more of the models above?
   Specifically for CFDEM, could that feature be only available in the Premium version?

Any answers, hints, advice would be very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
L.

One solver you are missing is driftFluxFoam, which is probably the simplest. I'm not that familiar with sediment transport, but my recommendation would be to neglect gas at first and only work on the solid transport in the water.

There is a scourFoam solver that is designed for your needs I think:

https://www.researchgate.net/publica...ORE_STRUCTURES

I'm studying this problem by OpemFOAM, I know another key technique is "dynamic mesh" based on interDyfoam, but i still don't konw how to realize it.Have you started to modify the code to work for you?:D