Abstract
The Swiss plate geophone system is a bed load surrogate monitoring technique that is used to quantify bed load transport in steep streams. The amplitude of the signal recorded by the Swiss plate geophone contains information about the grain-size distribution of the transported bed load. To extract this information, the authors computed the number of impulses and packets (representing a single particle impact) registered for different amplitude ranges, the so-called amplitude histograms, for 46 samples when bed load was measured independently with automatic basket samplers at the Erlenbach. Amplitude histograms can be interpreted as a statistical distribution of the signal’s amplitude over a given time interval. Using the number of bed load particles per unit mass, absolute bed load masses for each grain-size class can be calculated. The results show that the grain-size distribution of the transported bed load for particles larger than 9.5 mm can be continuously monitored at the Erlenbach with the Swiss plate geophone system.
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), grant200021_137681. The authors thank numerous Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL colleagues for their support with fieldwork at the Erlenbach. The paper was improved by the feedback provided by two anonymous reviewers.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 142 • Issue 5 • May 2016
Copyright
© 2016 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Oct 9, 2014
Accepted: Aug 3, 2015
Published online: Jan 21, 2016
Published in print: May 1, 2016
Discussion open until: Jun 21, 2016
ASCE Technical Topics:
- Bed loads
- Design (by type)
- Engineering fundamentals
- Engineering mechanics
- Grain (material)
- Infrastructure
- Load distribution
- Load factors
- Loading rates
- Material mechanics
- Material properties
- Materials engineering
- Plates
- River and stream beds
- River engineering
- Rivers and streams
- Structural design
- Structural engineering
- Structural members
- Structural systems
- Thermodynamics
- Traffic engineering
- Traffic management
- Traffic signals
- Transport phenomena
- Transport rates
- Transportation engineering
- Water and water resources
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