Transport Capacity of Overland Flow for Sediment Mixtures
Publication: Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 22, Issue 2
Abstract
Sediment transport capacity of overland flows is crucial to understanding and modeling the erosion and deposition processes. The transport capacity for sediment mixtures is particularly complex because of the need for an algorithm to allocate the total available shear stress or stream power to individual size classes. The transport capacity for sediment mixtures may not even be unique, depending on whether the flow is eroding or depositing sediments unless all sediments are of a single size class. Using data from a set of flume experiments involving steep slopes and high sediment concentrations, a formula was proposed for the sediment transport capacity limited by available stream power and available accommodation space for sediments. Sediments used for the experiment were further sieved into five distinct size classes. The sediment transport capacity was measured for 25 flow-slope combinations to validate a new formula for individual size classes, and to propose and test a method to compute the sediment transport capacity for sediment mixtures from that for individual size classes. An independent set of experimental data was used to validate the new formula for individual size classes. The results showed that the formulation for sediment transport capacity was consistent for all size classes, and the sediment transport capacity was not as sensitive to the settling velocity as expected. With the effect of settling velocity moderated, the predicted and observed sediment concentrations at the transport limit showed excellent agreement with the Nash-Sutcliffe coefficient of efficiency (Ec) of 0.96 for individual size classes. The paper also shows that the transport capacity for sediment mixtures can be computed as an average of the sediment transport capacity for individual size classes weighted by the size distribution and moderated settling velocity. The sediment transport capacity can also be predicted using the average settling velocity for sediment mixtures for this set of experiments. An independent validation test showed that the predicted and observed sediment concentration agreed well for the experimental data with the coefficient of determination , , and a bias of approximately 25%.
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Acknowledgments
The work was completed while the first author was on an academic visit to State Key Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering, Tsinghua University, sponsored by the Tsinghua Global Scholars Fellowship. The research is also partially funded by the State Key Laboratory of Earth Science Processes and Resources Ecology, Beijing Normal University (No. 2015-KF-10), State Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41530958), National Science & Technology Support Program in the Twelfth Five-Year Plan (No. 2012BAB02B02), and through an internal scheme of the Key State Laboratory of Hydroscience and Engineering, Tsinghua University (No. 2011-KY-4).
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Published In
Journal of Hydrologic Engineering
Volume 22 • Issue 2 • February 2017
Copyright
© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Feb 2, 2016
Accepted: Jul 26, 2016
Published online: Sep 2, 2016
Published in print: Feb 1, 2017
Discussion open until: Feb 2, 2017
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