Change sediment field to being a standard scalar field

Registered by Samuel Parkinson

The schema currently has sediment as a separate element in a material phase. Within this element you are able to specify a sediment field template, a sediment deposition field, and any number of sediment classes that use the sediment field template with customisation of specific sediment related parameters.

This has the following benefits:
- It ensures that all of the sediment fields are on the same mesh
- Several parameters only need to be specified once, including:
     - discretisation and solver settings
     - boundary and initial conditions (where appropriate)
     - density, diameter, porosity, erodability and critical shear stress (if any of these are the same for many sediment fields)
- It ensures that a sediment deposition field is created by making this essential for an flml file to be valid when using sediment

However, it has the following disadvantages:
- It requires a complicated sediment initialisation routine that must be maintained.
- It complicates running from checkpoints for sediment problems. This is due to the fact that diamond sees a checkpoint flml file as having an invalid structure
- there may be other issues that arise from this complication if changes are made to how sediments work. For example, if there is an option for a sediment field with distributed grain sizes (although I'm sure there would be a way to fit this into the current configuration)

I am suggesting that the benefits of this set up relating to being able to edit all sediment fields with a single change, are not so important now that it is easy to slice and group similar properties in diamond, and also copy/paste elements.

I also suggest that ensuring that a sediment deposition field is specified could be done via an error from fluidity if it is not. This would make it the same as when using a free surface and a free-surface diagnostic field is required.

Ensuring all sediment is on the same mesh could also be done through checks when running fluidity - The schema can be defined to suggest a mesh choice i.e. VelocityMesh

I think it would make the schema tidier, and the code easier to maintain, if a sediment field was included in the list of available scalar fields, in the same way as any other scalar field.

Blueprint information

Status:
Complete
Approver:
None
Priority:
Undefined
Drafter:
Samuel Parkinson
Direction:
Needs approval
Assignee:
Samuel Parkinson
Definition:
Approved
Series goal:
None
Implementation:
Implemented
Milestone target:
None
Started by
Samuel Parkinson
Completed by
Samuel Parkinson

Whiteboard

We need a method of knowing a scalar field is a sediment field. This could be done by including an attribute, not editable by the user, stating that it is a sediment field? The sediment initialisation code would search through the scalar fields for this attribute.

Additionally, I the deposition field could be contained within the sediment field. This would make relating them to each other more straight forward when creating the input files and also in the code.

(?)

Work Items

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