Abstract

The Saint-Venant–Exner (SVE) model is widely used for the description of sediment transport including bedload, erosion, and deposition processes. A modified version of the SVE model, which includes sediment concentration, incorporates exchange of sediment between the fluid and an erodible bed and a non-hydrostatic pressure for the fluid along with non-equilibrium entrainment and deposition velocities, is introduced. Gravitational effects on erosion are described by an effective shear stress formulation. This modified SVE model is derived from a general approach with density variations. It preserves the mass of both the sediment and the fluid, and satisfies a dissipative energy balance. On the other hand, well-balanced finite volume schemes adapted for SVE models are derived since standard well-balanced schemes for the Saint-Venant system with fixed bottom are in general no more well-balanced when applied to the SVE model. The latter property is due to the uncontrolled numerical diffusion associated with the bed evolution equation. Two novel techniques to achieve the well-balanced property for the modified SVE model are proposed. The first is a new polynomial-viscosity-matrix-based (PVM) scheme, denoted “PVM-2I”, that modifies the numerical approximation of the bed evolution equation according to its related characteristic speed. The second is a physically motivated correction of the numerical diffusion term for the Rusanov and Harten–Lax–van Leer (HLL) schemes. The proposed schemes are positivity-preserving for the water height. Numerical solutions are compared with exact solutions with gravitational effects, with a novel exact solution in non-equilibrium conditions, and with experimental data. It is illustrated how the use of standard non-well-balanced schemes leads to a large artificial (unphysical) erosion and completely degraded solutions. This undesirable behaviour is avoided by the proposed well-balanced schemes. Moreover, it is demonstrated that for dam-break flows the inclusion of non-hydrostatic pressure improves the prediction of the water surface and sediment evolution, while for overtopping flow erosion tests, accounting for erosion–deposition exchanges between the bedload and suspended sediment layers leads to better agreement with experimental data. © 2025 The Authors