Abstract
Sediment supply governs the bedload transport and bed morphology in rivers. Up to the present, the impacts of magnitude and texture of variable sediment supply (e.g., induced by flash flood from tributaries) on bedload transport are unknown, limiting the capacity of flood control and river management significantly. The present study conducted flume experiments to investigate the responses of bedload transport to variable sediment supply regimes with different peak supply rates and grain size distributions. The experimental results indicate that: the bedload rate and mass increase with increasing the peak rate of the variable sediment supply, and decrease with an increase in the proportion of coarse particles; the particles coarser than the median grain size of the supplied sediment D50 are primarily stored in the bed, while those finer than D50 are mainly transported downstream; during the variable sediment supply process, the critical Shields stress of sediment has a similar development trend to that of the bedload rate but with a slight ahead of time.
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Abbreviations
- D 16 :
-
Particle size at which 16% of the supplied sediment is finer
- D 16 l :
-
Particle size at which 16% of the transport sediment is finer
- D 50 :
-
Median particle size at which 50% of the supplied sediment is finer
- D 50 l :
-
Median particle size at which 50% of the transport sediment is finer
- D 84 :
-
Particle size at which 84% of the supplied sediment is finer
- D 84 l :
-
Particle size at which 84% of the transport sediment is finer
- g :
-
Gravitational acceleration
- H :
-
Approach flow depth
- M bf :
-
Total sediment supply mass
- q b :
-
Bedload transport rate
- q b max :
-
Maximum bedload transport rate
- q b * :
-
Dimensionless bedload rate
- q bf low :
-
Initial sediment supply rate
- q bf peak :
-
Peak sediment supply rate
- Q :
-
Flow discharge
- S b :
-
Bed slope
- S w :
-
Water surface slope
- T :
-
Duration of the experiment
- T r :
-
Duration of the rising limb of the variable sediment supply process
- T f :
-
Duration of the declining limb of the variable sediment supply process
- T bf :
-
Sediment supply duration
- W t :
-
Total bedload mass
- η :
-
Normalized peak supply rate
- ρ :
-
Fluid density
- ρ s :
-
Sediment density
- σ g :
-
Geometric standard deviation
- τ :
-
Bed shear stress
- τ * :
-
Dimensionless shear stress
- τ c * :
-
Critical Shields stress
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U20A20319, 52279074) and the Sichuan Science and Technology Program (2023NSFSC1989).
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Zhou, Q., Wang, L., Li, Q. et al. Impacts of magnitude and texture of variable sediment supply on bedload transport. Acta Geophys. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11600-024-01364-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11600-024-01364-w