Abstract
The motion of suspended sediment particles is discussed with the aim of determining which aspects are important and which ones can be neglected when the goal is to model coastal sediment transport. It is shown that the key lies in the structure of the flow, i e, vortices versus wave orbital motion, rather than in details of the drag law. With a proper description of the flow structure the most important phenomena can be modelled under simple assumption that the sediment velocity is everywhere the sum of the local, instantaneous fluid velocity and the still water settling velocity of the sediment: us = u + wo- Guide lines are also given for dealing with sediment in numerical models. This paper considers only non-cohesive particles in thin suspensions where the interaction of sediment particles can be safely neglected.
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