Analytic Review of Fundamental Research in Turbulence-Sediment Interactions

The majority of sediment transport takes place in turbulent flow conditions; hence we need to understand the nature of turbulence interactions with sediment particles. Because of multiple competing mechanisms, modelling the turbulence-sediment interactions is extremely challenging. Despite high-performance computing, current sediment transport models cannot accurately predict large-scale sediment transport. Moreover, the available experimental database provides contradictory results. This paper presents an analytic review of the interaction between turbulence and sediments, which forms the foundation of current sediment transport models. Specific attention is given to our present knowledge of the challenges in modelling sediment transport in turbulent flows. Since the literature substantiates that the subject matter of turbulence-sediment interaction has been typically studied in limiting cases, the present study stresses the need for intelligent simplifications of the real flow problems, efficient computational methods, objective-oriented experiments, advanced physics-based models and deeper theoretical insights into the simulation data.