Abstract
Riverbank erosion is a natural process in rivers that can become exacerbated by direct and indirect human impacts. Unfortunately, riverbank degradation can cause societal impacts such as property loss and sedimentation of in-stream structures, as well as environmental impacts such as water quality impact. The frequency, magnitude, and impact of riverbank collapse events in China and worldwide are forecasted to increase under climate change. To understand and mitigate the risk of riverbank collapse, experimental/field data in real conditions are required to provide robust calibration and validation of hydraulic and mathematical models. This paper presents an experimental set of tests conducted to characterize riverbank erosion and sediment transport for banks with slopes of 45°, 60°, 75°, and 90° and quantify the amount of sediments transported by the river, deposited within the bank toe or settled in the riverbed after having been removed due to erosion. The results showed interesting comprehension about the characterization of riverbank erosion and sediment transport along the river. These insights can be used for calibration and validation of new and existing numerical models.
Highlights
Rivers and streams are dynamic systems and are continuously changing their structure due to different flow conditions
These deformations assume different shapes and typically alter the cross-sectional morphology of the river affected. This phenomenon plays a very important role in the evolution of rivers, and despite the fact that some stable rivers have a healthy amount of erosion from which they benefit, unstable rivers and the erosion taking place on their banks are a cause for economic, environmental, and social concern: for example, (i) people are forced to migrate due to land erosion; (ii) riverbank collapse causes the loss of large areas of farmland; (iii) riverbank collapse can change the original boundary conditions of the river as well
This paper presents the results obtained with an experimental flume constructed at the Key Laboratory of Water and Sediment located within the School of Environment of Beijing Normal University, investigated the phenomenon of riverbank collapse utilizing a variety of slopes (45◦, 60◦, 75◦, and 90◦ ) for cohesive banks, and characterized the transport of riverbank eroded material within rivers under dissimilar flow conditions (45 and 60 L/s)
Summary
Rivers and streams are dynamic systems and are continuously changing their structure due to different flow conditions. Jia et al [31], based on the Osman model, built a three-dimensional water sediment model with bank deformation considered and effectively simulated the horizontal oscillations of river channels caused by cohesive riverbank collapse These studies demonstrate that the riverbed erosion is a phenomenon clearly observed but they do not consider the characterization of the motion of the sediment eroded and the load in the riverbed. This paper presents the results obtained with an experimental flume constructed at the Key Laboratory of Water and Sediment located within the School of Environment of Beijing Normal University, investigated the phenomenon of riverbank collapse utilizing a variety of slopes (45◦ , 60◦ , 75◦ , and 90◦ ) for cohesive banks, and characterized the transport of riverbank eroded material within rivers under dissimilar flow conditions (45 and 60 L/s). The datasets provided led to new insights for riverbank erosion under novel specific physical and hydraulic conditions and can be used by numerical modelers to validate relationships between variables associated with this natural phenomenon
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