Abstract
This paper, written to mark the 60th anniversary of the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, focuses on the nature of meandering flow and its coupling to bed and bank deformation. An outline of the present understanding of the kinematics of meandering flow and how the flow shapes the bed, with a view towards the conditions in real alluvial meandering rivers, is presented. The flow and its interaction with the bed are analyzed by treating separately the effects on the flow of channel curvature and streamwise variation of channel curvature and by considering the results of numerous laboratory and numerical experiments carried out to date. The approach is used to explain essential differences in meandering bed topography exhibited by streams with varying values of sinuosity and width-to-depth ratio. The paper is also used as an opportunity to address the question of why, in the absence of geological constraints, some streams tend to remain regular in plan shape (i.e., symmetric in plan view with regard to the axis of bend) even when their loops actively expand laterally, whereas others acquire irregular plan shapes. This question is considered in view of the intrinsically different mechanics of bed deformation and bank erosion and a new experiment on bank erosion. The paper suggests that differences in the erodibility of the bed and banks may be a significant contributing factor to the planimetric fate of the stream.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are deeply grateful to Dr. Thanos Papanicolaou for the invitation to prepare this paper. The research presented in the last section in this paper was funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) through a Discovery Grant to the first author. Sources of funding for other research previously authored or coauthored by the first author and mentioned in this paper are acknowledged in the original publications. The authors would also like to thank Ms. Regina Huber, Hydraulic Engineer at Inros Lackner AG (Germany) and formerly M.Sc. student of the Technical University of Munich and Visiting Research Student at Queen’s University, for her help with the collection of the data reported in the “Action of Flow on the Banks” section as well as contributions to its preliminary analysis.
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Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 143 • Issue 9 • September 2017
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©2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Jul 6, 2016
Accepted: Feb 7, 2017
Published online: May 27, 2017
Published in print: Sep 1, 2017
Discussion open until: Oct 27, 2017
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