Field Measurement of the Probability of Coarse-Grained Sediment Entrainment in Natural Rivers
Publication: Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 146, Issue 4
Abstract
This study takes advantage of recent advances in field-based sediment motion monitoring to report direct field measurements of the bedload pick-up, or entrainment, function in natural gravel-bed channels. Bedload sediment tracers with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags were placed upstream of five run-of-river dams that locally change the energy grade slope of the river, allowing for the initiation of tracer motion to be investigated across a range of slopes, flow depths, and surrounding bed grain sizes. Results based on transect-averaged shear stresses differ from those based on location-dependent shear stresses determined using a two-dimensional (2D) flow model. Using 2D shear stresses, the results show that as the tracer size decreases below the median size of the surrounding particles on the bed, both the mean and standard deviation of the Shields value for mobilization increase, reflecting the impact of both hiding and protrusion effects. The increase in the average Shields value for mobilization with decreasing relative grain size is consistent with the predictions of proposed hiding functions. As the relative tracer size increases, the entrainment of the tracers approaches that predicted by the model of Einstein (1950), which ignores intergranular bed geometry effects.
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Data Availability Statement
All data, models, and code generated or used during the study appear in the published article.
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by a Geological Society of America Graduate Student Research Grant, US National Science Foundation grant BCS-1626414, and from the Dartmouth College Neukom Institute for Computational Science as well as a Dartmouth College Provost Seed grant.
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Published In
Journal of Hydraulic Engineering
Volume 146 • Issue 4 • April 2020
Copyright
©2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Aug 6, 2018
Accepted: Jul 22, 2019
Published online: Feb 13, 2020
Published in print: Apr 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Jul 13, 2020
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