Substantial variations in the particle flux are commonly observed in field measurements on gravel-bed rivers and in laboratory experiments mimicking river behavior on a smaller scale. These fluctuations can be explained by the natural variability of sediment supply and hydraulic conditions. We conducted laboratory experiments of particle transport down a two-dimensional inclined channel, for wh...

A theory is presented for the mass transport induced by a small-amplitude progressive wave propagating in water over a thin layer of viscoelastic mud modelled as a Voigt medium. Based on a sharp contrast in length scales near the bed, the boundary-layer approximation is applied to the Navier–Stokes equations in Lagrangian form, which are then solved for the first-order oscillatory motions in th...

Fries et al. (1999), hereafter referred to as FBW, present interesting experimental data showing that biogenic mounds, formed by the conveyor-belt feeding polychaete Cistenides (Pectinaria) gouldii, can be reshaped into asymmetric bedforms at bed shear stresses below the Shields threshold of sediment movement. The ®nal geometry of the current ripples was found to depend on the spatial density o...

Bed stresses in the bottom boundary layer of the York River estuary, Va., were estimated from 3D near-bottom velocities measured by Acoustic Doppler Velocimeters (ADVs) and also by a profiling array of electromagnetic current meters. By assuming the measurements were made in a constant stress layer, four methods of stress estimation were evaluated using ADVs: (1) direct covariance (COV) measure...

A high-fidelity DEM-CFD model is newly proposed for process intensification of packed bed reactors. The discrete element method (DEM) is employed for simulating random packing under gravity with hundreds of spheres in a cylindrical tube. It is verified that the DEM is capable of constituting a packed bed whose voidage well agrees with the literature according to particle-to-tube diameter ratio....

The mass and size distribution of grain entrainment per unit bed area may be measured by replacing a volume of the bed with tracer gravels and observing the mass difference before and after a transport event. This measure of spatial entrainment is relevant to any process involving size-selective exchange of sediment between transport and bed and may be directly used in calculations of sediment ...

We investigate the mechanics of ice streams and glaciers flowing over a bed consisting of Coulomb-plastic subglacial sediment, or more generally, of channel flows with Coulomb or ‘solid’ friction laws at the boundary. Sliding is assumed to occur if shear stress at the glacier bed attains a prescribed, locally defined yield stress, while no sliding is assumed possible below that yield stress. Im...