A semi-implicit finite volume method for the Exner model of sediment transport

The aim of this work is to construct efficient finite volume schemes for the numerical study of sediment transport in shallow water, in the framework of the Exner model [7,10]. In most cases, the velocity related to the sediment is much lower that the fluid velocity, which, in turn, may be much lower that the free-surface wave speed. Explicit methods that resolve all waves require small time steps due to the CFL stability restriction because of fast surface waves. Furthermore, if Rusanov flux is adopted, slow sediment waves may be affected by the large numerical diffusion. The objective of the present work is to drastically improve the efficiency in the computation of the evolution of the sediment by treating water waves implicitly, thus allowing much larger time steps than the one required by fully explicit schemes. The goal is reached by suitably semi-implicit schemes obtained by the use of implicit-explicit Runge-Kutta methods.