Journal of Hydraulic Engineering

Live-bed scour at a vertical-wall abutment is experimentally investigated with specific attention paid to the conceptual issues concerning the temporal development of local scour phenomenon. First explored are the time scales for the initial rising phase of the time variation of scour depth. An appropriate identification of such scales and of their normalizing parameters makes it possible to recognize a quantitative dependency of nondimensional time scales on flow intensity. Second, the time scales for the subsequent fluctuations around a mean equilibrium value are considered. Experimental results indicate that the quasiperiodical fluctuations of scour depths do not always correspond to those of bed forms. A conceptual model is outlined to explain this aspect.

Regulations require U.K. water companies to reduce the number of properties at risk of sewer flooding. One of the potential causes of sewer flooding is the presence of persistent sediment deposits in sewers, such deposits are a common problem in many combined sewers. Although the regulations are risk based, there is a gap in the current knowledge on how the risk assessment is affected by the uncertainty in sewer sediment transport prediction. This paper describes the development of a methodology for estimating uncertainty in sewer sediment deposit depth predictions using existing empirically calibrated sediment load equations and Monte Carlo simulations combined with a response database. This methodology has been used to estimate the range of uncertainty of in-pipe deposit build-up predictions for a U.K. combined sewer system that suffered persistent deposition problems.

Turbidity currents in the ocean and lakes are driven by suspended sediment. The vertical profiles of velocity and excess density are shaped by the interaction between the current and the bed as well as between the current and the ambient water above. We present results of a set of 74 experiments that focus on the characteristics of velocity and fractional excess density profiles of saline density and turbidity currents flowing over a mobile bed. The gravity flows include saline density flows, hybrid saline/turbidity currents and a pure turbidity current. The use of dissolved salt is a surrogate for suspended mud that is so fine that it does not settle out readily. Thus, all the currents can be considered to be model turbidity currents. The data cover both Froude-subcritical and Froude-supercritical regimes. Depending on flow conditions, the bed remains flat or bed forms develop over time, which in turn affect vertical profiles. For plane bed experiments, subcritical flow profiles have velocity peaks located higher up in the flow, and display a sharper interface at the top of the current, than their supercritical counterparts. The latter have excess density profiles that decline exponentially upward from the bed, whereas subcritical flows show profiles with a region near the bed where excess density varies little. Wherever bed forms are present, they have a significant effect on the profiles. Especially for Froude-supercritical flow, bed forms push the location of peak velocity upward, and render the near-bed fractional excess density more uniform. In the case of subcritical flow, bed forms do not significantly affect fractional excess density profiles; velocity profiles are pushed farther upward from the bed than in the case of a plane bed, but to a lesser extent than for supercritical bed forms. Overall, the relative position of the velocity peak above the bed shows a dependence upon flow regime, being lowered for increasing Froude number ${\mathsf{F}}_d$ . Gradient Richardson numbers $\mathsf{R}{\mathsf{i}}_g$ in the near-bed region increase with increasing ${\mathsf{F}}_d$ , but are lower than the critical value of 0.25, indicating that near-bed turbulent structures are not notably suppressed. At the top interface, values of $\mathsf{R}{\mathsf{i}}_g$ are above the critical value for subcritical and mildly supercritical ${\mathsf{F}}_d$ , effectively damping turbulence. However as ${\mathsf{F}}_d$ increases, $\mathsf{R}{\mathsf{i}}_g$ goes below the critical value. Shape factors calculated from the profiles for use in the depth-averaged equation of motion are evaluated for different flow and bed conditions. Normalized experimental profiles for supercritical currents scale up well with observations of field-scale turbidity currents in the Monterey Canyon, and the range of average bed slopes and Froude numbers also compare favorably with estimated field-scale flow conditions for the Amazon canyon and fan. This suggests that the experimental results can be used to interpret the kinds of flows that are responsible for the shaping of major submarine canyon-fan systems.

Interactions of aquatic plants with turbulent flows in fluvial systems have attracted considerable interest. While there have been recent advances in theories that describe vegetation-flow interactions in idealized laboratory flows, their practical application is still problematic due to limited knowledge of effects caused by heterogeneously (patchy) distributed plants in naturally formed vegetative mosaics in rivers. This paper reports on a study in a lowland river, aimed at quantification and parameterization of vegetation effects on redistribution of mean and turbulent characteristics of the flow and their consequences for hydraulic resistance. The measurements were carried out in summer on a river reach with a patchy mosaic dominated by submerged flexible aquatic plants and repeated at the same water level in early spring before the plants start growing. This design of the study allowed for quantitative evaluation of the effects caused by flow-plants interactions on bulk flow parameters at comparable submergences of riverbed roughness elements (sediment grains and sand bars). The study indicates that symmetrical quasi-two-dimensional open-channel flow structure in unvegetated riverbed was transformed into highly fragmented complex flow pattern spatially arranged by patches and free paths in the mosaic. Despite complexities and three dimensionality of the flow, normalized mean velocity profiles in the patches were satisfactory described by hyperbolic tangent function while flow in the free paths, similarly to unvegetated channel, was in a reasonable agreement with the conventional logarithmic law.

A developing boundary layer starts at the spillway crest until it reaches the free surface at the so-called inception point, where the natural air entrainment is initiated. A detailed reanalysis of the turbulent velocity profiles on steep chutes is made herein, including mean values for the parameters of the complete turbulent velocity profile in the turbulent rough flow regime, given by the log-wake law. Accounting both for the laws of the wall and the wake, a new rational approach is proposed for a power-law velocity profile within the boundary layer of turbulent rough chute flow. This novel approach directly includes the power-law parameters and does not require for a profile matching, as is currently required. The results obtained for the turbulent velocity profiles were applied to analytically determine the resistance characteristics for chute flows. The results apply to the developing flow zone upstream of air inception in chute spillways.

The method used in the classical paper by Zielke to estimate the unsteady component of shear stress in unsteady pipe flows is revisited. It is found that the method is undesirably sensitive to the size of the integration time step. The sensitivity is shown to be caused dominantly by the first term in the integration when inadequate allowance is made for the infinite value of the weighting function. A simple method of avoiding the error without requiring the use of small grid sizes is presented.