Laboratory Measurements of Bed Load Sediment Transport Dynamics
Publication: Journal of Waterway, Port, Coastal, and Ocean Engineering
Volume 132, Issue 3
Abstract
A video technique has been developed to study the motion of individual sediment particles under waves. The technique was developed for moveable bed conditions under waves in the Davidson Laboratory’s large wave tank. Experiments were conducted with grain sizes of 1, 2, and . All runs were applied to a modified Shields diagram and accurately predicted the region of motion and no motion. This proves that shear stress is an accurate predictor of grain movement initiation for a flat bed. The individual particle velocities were also measured. An ensemble average of particle velocity with respect to wave phase compared well with Sleath’s expression for instantaneous bed load transport.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a grant from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. The writers wish to thank Kelly Rankin and Tom Herrington in helping design the experiments and Patrick Burke, Anne Pence, Raju Datla, and Robert Miskewitz for assisting in the laboratory work. Special thanks are also extended to Rick Aleman for authoring the Perl code used to output the ADV sample number to the video.
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© 2006 ASCE.
History
Received: Sep 19, 2002
Accepted: Sep 13, 2005
Published online: May 1, 2006
Published in print: May 2006
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