SEDINTERFOAM: A MULTI-PHASE NUMERICAL MODEL FOR SEDIMENT TRANSPORT AND ITS APPLICATION TO SWASH ZONES

Rising sea levels and extreme storm events due to climate change have emerged as a significant concern for coastal communities. High-fidelity modeling of the physical processes occurring in the swash zone can help in understanding the exchange of sediment between emerged and submerged portions of the beach undergoing rapid morphological evolution. Wave propagation and breaking over sloping beaches in the surf zone causes complex evolution of flows and turbulence. To model the resulting sediment transport, the air-water interfaces (free-surface) need to be solved simultaneously with the sediment phase through a three-phase modeling methodology to simulate bathymetry changes as a holistic system. A widely used open-source model for sediment transport, SedFoam (Chauchat et al., 2017) is formulated for miscible liquid and particle phases and lacking the capability in modeling air-water-sediment interfaces for more complete coastal processes. Recently, a consistent three-phase model including the miscible liquid-sediment phase and the immiscible air phase is developed and the new model is named SedInterFoam (Mathieu et al. 2023, in preparation). The main objective of this study is to apply SedInterFoam to investigate the hydrodynamics and morphodynamics induced by a solitary wave breaking over a sloping beach reported in a comprehensive laboratory experiment by Sumer et al. (2011).