Modeling Incipient Erosion and Quantifying Erosion Rates with A Computational Fluid Dynamics Framework

Predicting fine-grained sediment erosion is important for evaluating geochemical cycling, contaminant transport, and is foundational to fluvial geomorphic processes. Previous attempts to create predictive models have been insufficient due to the complex hydro-mechanical-chemical couplings that exist between fine-grained particles resulting in mechanically notable particle-particle interactions. In this work, we base our study on our previously developed Darcy-Brinkman-Biot framework. This framework represents clay erosion by incorporating sub-REV (Representative Elementary Volume) properties of bentonite, calculating clay-water momentum transfer quantities, and allowing for phase flow through and around deformable porous media.