Investigation of Cross Shore Sediment Transport Using Physical and Numerical Methods

Efforts have been made to estimate the sediment transport and beach profile evolution during storm conditions based on surf zone hydrodynamics. This study compensates, to some extent, for the lack of information describing the coastal processes, particularly cross shore sediment transport and short term beach profile evolution in response to storm events. In this regard, following extensive series of experiments, the Litpack model is used to predict the beach profile evolution in an artificial beach. The profile evolution results predicted by the model compared to those found in the experimental measurements are illustrated clearly. The accuracy of the model is still to be improved; nevertheless, the results illustrate the feasibility of the Litpack model to predict the beach profile evolution in coastal regions. The main objectives of these experiments were to undertake a quantitative comparison of cross shore sediment transport and beach profile evolution with different sizes of sand. Increasing the size of beach material results in reduction in cross shore sediment transport and beach profile evolution for coarse beaches. The results obtained from the model compared to the experimental results are promising and encouraging for further modeling developments. Comparison of the results obtained from experiments and numerical models show that the Litpack program can predict the full scale behavior of beaches with reasonable accuracy, however, due to the scale effects its prediction for the laboratory conditions is not very decisive.