Estimation of Effective Roughness for Water-Worked Gravel Surfaces
Publication: Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 138, Issue 11
Abstract
There is no accepted standard equation for predicting flow resistance in gravel rivers. This is mainly because of the lack of an effective approach for describing the roughness of the gravel surface. This paper aims at describing the roughness of gravel surfaces based on characteristics of the elevation field rather than conventionally used grain size distribution. A new parameter—the coarseness parameter—in addition to the steepness parameter and standard deviation of the elevation field is proposed for characterizing the roughness of gravel surfaces. Two groups of rough surfaces (A and B) were generated using unconditional Gaussian simulation to study the influence of the coarseness and steepness parameters on effective roughness. The effective roughness of groups A and B was calculated by a two-equation turbulence model, and a quantitative relationship between the effective roughness and proposed parameters was derived. The resulting relationship derived from groups A and B was validated using data from flume experiments (group C). The results confirm the dependence of the effective roughness on the proposed parameters.
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Acknowledgments
The writers would like to thank Dr. J. Aberle who kindly provided the DEMs and flow data of flume experiments. Financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51039004), the National Key Technologies R&D Program of China during the 12th Five-Year Plan Period (No. 2012BAB05B01), and a grant (4634/05H) from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council is gratefully acknowledged. The writers thank the associate editor and anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments.
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Information & Authors
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Published In
Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 138 • Issue 11 • November 2012
Pages: 923 - 934
Copyright
© 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 1, 2010
Accepted: Apr 13, 2012
Published online: Oct 15, 2012
Published in print: Nov 1, 2012
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