Introduction

Dredge plumes originate from the spillage of dredged material. Especially fine sediment can stay in suspension on long time and spatial scales. One of the environmental impacts related to dredging is increased suspended sediment concentration levels due to these dredge plumes. An increase in the sediment concentration in the water column can have negative impact on nature. Dredge tracks can be modeled with Delft3D. The basic idea is that you introduce discharge locations inside the model domain and during a certain time period these discharge point become active and result in an amount of discharge with a certain concentration level. The problem is often however how to define these discharge point. For that matter, this toolbox can be used.

Usage of the toolbox

First of all the user needs to make a Delft3D-FLOW model, active sediment and add a sediment fraction(s). After that modeling dredge plumes can be done in three steps:

1. Draw a track by clicking on 'Add Track'
2. Define settings of the cycle in terms of discharge and sediment concentration
3. Generate the discharge points in the model by clicking on 'Generate!'

Image Added

Figure: example of a dredge track in the ocean at West AfricaUnder development