A well-balanced PCCU-AENO scheme for a sediment transport model

We develop in this work a new well-balanced preserving-positivity path-conservative central-upwind scheme for Saint-Venant-Exner (SVE) model. The SVE system (SVEs) under some considerations, is a nonconservative hyperbolic system of nonlinear partial differential equations. This model is widely used in coastal engineering to simulate the interaction of fluid flow with sediment beds. It is well known that SVEs requires a robust treatment of nonconservative terms. Some efficient numerical schemes have been proposed to overcome the difficulties related to these terms. However, the main drawbacks of these schemes are what follows: (i) Lack of robustness, (ii) Generation of non-physical diffusions, (iii) Presence of instabilities within numerical solutions. This collection of drawbacks weakens the efficiency of most numerical methods proposed in the literature. To overcome these drawbacks a reformulation of the central-upwind scheme for SVEs (CU-SVEs for short) in a path-conservative version is presented in this work. We first develop a finite-volume method of the first order and then extend it to the second order via the averaging essentially non oscillatory (AENO) framework. Our numerical approach is shown to be well-balanced positivity-preserving and shock-capturing. The resulting scheme could be seen as a predictor-corrector method. The accuracy and robustness of the proposed scheme are assessed through a carefully selected suite of tests.