| Abstract: | Sediments are an essential habitat compartment in rivers, which is a subject to dynamic transport processes. In many rivers, the fine deposited sediments are contaminated with heavy metals and organic compounds. Contaminated deposits are considered as potential hot spots because of the risk of the mobilization under erosive hydraulic conditions. Numerical models for particulate contaminant transport are then necessary and can be applied to estimate and predict the potential impact of mobilized contaminants as an important contribution to sediment management. This paper focuses on the quantification of the amount of contaminated sediments resuspended during the extreme flood event in 1999 and the prediction of deposition one year after the flood event. To assess such erosive flood event, a 2D numerical transport model was developed to analyse the dynamics of erosion and sedimentation processes in the headwater of a cross dam at the Upper Rhine River. The dam consists of a weir, a hydropower plant, and a navigation lock. As the weir is operating only for flood management, a huge amount of sediment highly contaminated with the hexachlorobenzene (HCB) was deposited in the weir zone. Therefore, numerical simulations were performed to determine the spatial and temporal distribution of deposited contaminated sediments as depending on the river discharge and its distribution to the hydraulic structures. The numerical investigation presented here is taken as a retrospective analysis of the contaminated sediment dynamics in the headwater to improve future sediment management. |
