Seeding Strategies

Explain the different strategies available for seeding particles to the end user. Focus on what the user needs to know, not on how it is implemented. Long explanations should be avoided. Only explain what is necessary for the user to know. If a longer explanation is needed, a different section should be created with explains the soundings of the strategies from the point of view of an expert in sediment transport.

Particle seeding in SedTRAILS

This section needs to be rethought and rewritten. Currently, it sounds more like explaning than instructing the user.

Seeding is the process of adding the particle(s) to the model. In SedTRAILS, the type and initial position(s) of the sediment(s) are set as separate populations. The options for particle types are sand, mud, and passive tracer. Multiple strategies are available to locate the paticles as initial conditions. They can be added as either a single particle (point strategy) or more. In case of adding many particles, they can be located along a spcified line (transect strategy), or within a polygon (grid and random strategies).

Inputs required for particle types:

Sand	Mud	Passive
grain size	grain size	grain size
???	???	???

Inputs required for seeding strategies:

Point	Transect	Grid (uniform)	Grid (random)
x, y	x1, y1	x1, y1	???
???	x2, y2	x2, y2	???
???	???	particle distance	???
???	???	???	???

Here I copy paste Manuel’s comments in Github issue#267. I will revise this part of the documentation while the seeding factory is finalised.

“”” The code in this PR follows this reasoning:

The seeding tool generates n-number of particles for a population using the seeding strategy defined in the configuration for each population. The number of particle per location are defined by quantity and the number of seeding locations depend on the strategy used. e.g., above only one seed location is specified. The number of seeding locations for some of the strategies are computed at runtime (e.g., grid). The total number of particle in a population is the product of quantity * seeding locations When seeding happens a list with the total number of particles in a population is created. If more than one population is specified in the configuration file, than particle creation should be repeated for each one (I will work on automating this). The creation of particle is manage by a ParticleFactory, which takes the configuration for a population and generates the particles, assigns the initial x,y coordinates, release_time (release_start) and quantity. “””