Bed-Load Transport Measurements with Geophones and Other Passive Acoustic Methods
Publication: Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 143, Issue 6
Abstract
This paper reviews the more widely used bed-load surrogate acoustic measuring techniques that were tested both in flume experiments and field settings. A fair number of these measuring techniques have been successfully calibrated for total bed-load flux, which generally requires contemporary direct bed-load transport measurements in the field. Essentially, linear or power-law relations were established between a simple metric characterizing the acoustic signal and bed-load mass. In some studies, further calibration relations were established to identify particle size, either based on signal amplitude and/or on characteristic frequency of that part of the signal associated with a single impact of a particle (e.g., for impact plate systems), or by determining a characteristic frequency for an entire grain-size mixture (for the hydrophone system). A few of the acoustic measuring techniques were used to determine bed-load transport by grain-size classes. Some studies examined how far findings from flume experiments can be quantitatively transferred and applied to field sites for which independent, direct calibration measurements exist.
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Acknowledgments
A part of the text material presented here was first written for a chapter (Rickenmann 2017) in a book resulting from the Gravel-Bed River Workshop 2015 held in Japan, entitled “Gravel Bed Rivers and Disasters,” edited by Daizo Tsutsumi and Johnathan B. Laronne, and published by Wiley. Reusing text material was made in agreement with the book editors, Wiley publisher, and the chief editor of the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, Thanos Papanicolaou. A fair number of studies with bed-load surrogate measuring techniques were published after the writing of the book chapter, and they are included in this updated review. In addition, new material is included and discussed in this paper. The author thanks Carlos Wyss for the frequency analysis of the Erlenbach snowmelt field experiments presented in Fig. 5 and for the data in Fig. 4.
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Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 143 • Issue 6 • June 2017
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©2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Jun 29, 2016
Accepted: Nov 16, 2016
Published online: Mar 17, 2017
Published in print: Jun 1, 2017
Discussion open until: Aug 17, 2017
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