Contaminated Sediment Transport
Suspended sediments are a major component of the suspended load and sediment bed in many rivers, lakes, estuaries and coastal waters. The concern is that contaminated suspended sediments in the water column eventually deposit on the sediment bed where contaminants concentrate. The fate and transport of the contaminated sediment, whether in suspension or deposited, is essential to characterize the sediment and contaminants distributions in waterbodies.

HydroQual uses its own state-of-art model ECOMSED, as well as other public domain sediment transport frameworks, to model cohesive and non-cohesive sediment transport. ECOMSED is coupled with two- or three-dimensional hydrodynamic and wave models. A unique characteristic of ECOMSED is its use of in-situ field measurements to accurately describe re-suspension and deposition processes, including the effects of salinity on the flocculation of cohesive sediments.

Because sediment transport models are often used to support one or more chemical model, ECOMSED is linked to HydroQual's water quality model RCA. The model has an orthogonal, curvilinear coordinate system that allows the use of a variable numerical grid. This feature is important when dealing with complex geometries encountered in rivers and estuarine settings.