Progress and prospect of deep-water gravity flow sedimentary simulation

Key words: 
• Key words：Deepwater gravity flow /
• turbidity current /
• physical simulation /
• numerical simulation

Abstract: Abstract：[Significance] Sediment gravity flow is an effective recorder of tectonic activities, encompassing climate extreme events and paleoearthquakes. Moreover, it stands as a paramount contributor to the global reserves and production of new oil and gas resources. The event-driven nature of the process and the unique characteristics of the deposition site present significant challenges for conducting field observations on deep-water gravity flow processes, resulting in limited availability of data. Sedimentary simulation has emerged as the primary approach for comprehending the dynamic processes and governing principles of deep-water gravity flow deposition. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive review of the advancements in simulating deep-water gravity flow deposition, encompassing both physical and numerical simulation approaches. [Progress]Through a systematic literature review, it seeks to summarize the current understanding and future research directions pertaining to the process of deep-water gravity flow deposition and its governing principles. Firstly, this section provides a comprehensive summary of the principles, monitoring technology, and progress in laboratory construction for sedimentary physical simulation experiments. Furthermore, it elucidates the influence of material composition and content, flow state, as well as energy differences in fluid on the formation, transportation, and depositional processes of sediment gravity flows .Additionally, the response characteristics of sediment gravity flow alone and under the influence of external fluids such as contour currents are addressed. Furthermore, this study provides a comprehensive review of the historical development of numerical simulation techniques for sediment gravity flow, existing simulation platforms, and their advancements in simulating sedimentary processes influenced by fluid structure, hydrodynamic parameters, and complex topography. [Conclusions and Prospects]The comparative analysis shows that physical simulation is obviously limited by the space-time scale of the laboratory. Meeting the hydrodynamic parameters of the deposition process with real-world accuracy is challenging. The numerical simulation method satisfies the requirement that the simulation scale is consistent with the real model; however, it is constrained by theoretical research in computational fluid dynamics. Moreover, it does not yield ideal results in modeling high concentration particle movement and turbidity current erosion. The future of simulating deep-water gravity flow deposition will heavily rely on interdisciplinary collaboration, integrating key physical simulation results and leveraging the continuity outcomes of numerical simulation to enhance our understanding of the mechanisms behind deep-water gravity flow deposition. This approach presents a novel methodology for exploring oil and gas reserves in deepwater environments.