Simulation of resuspended sediments resulting from dredging operations by a numerical flocculent transport model

Environmental remediations such as dredging operations cause contaminated sediments from the bottom of water bodies to become suspended into the water column. These resuspended particles are significant water quality concerns and cause adverse effects to aquatic organisms. In this paper, we present a vertically integrated two-dimensional flocculent sediment transport model to better model concentration changes of resuspended bottom sediments. The flocculent transport model has been applied to the Savannah River cutterhead dredge field study involving the resuspension of bottom sediments. The results showed that the model predictions correlate reasonably well with field data. These comparisons suggest that the flocculent sediment transport model can be used to predict the concentration profiles of a plume of toxic compounds resulting from cutterhead dredge operation.