An Improved Analytical Model for Vertical Velocity Distribution of Vegetated Channel Flows

Abstract

The existence of vegetation plays an important role to protect the ecosystem and water environment in natural rivers and wetlands, but it alters the velocity field of flow, consequently influencing the transport of pollutant and biomass. As a pre-requisite for the analysis of environmental capacity in a channel, the vertical velocity distribution of flows has attracted much research attention; however, there is yet lack of a good prediction model available. For the channel with submerged vegetation, the vertical velocity distribution in the lower vegetation layer will be different from that in the upper flow layer of non-vegetation. In this paper, after review on the most recent two-layer model proposed by Baptist et al., the author has proposed an improved two-layer analytical model by introducing a different mixing length scale (λ). The proposed model is based on the momentum equation of flow with the turbulent eddy viscosity assumed as a linear relationship with the local velocity. The proposed model is compared with the Baptist model for different datasets published in the literature, which shows that the proposed analytical model can improve the vertical velocity distribution prediction well compared with the Baptist model for a range of data. This study reveals that the λ is well related with the submergence of vegetation (H/h), as suggested by . When the constant β is taken as 3/100, the proposed model shows good agreement with a wide range of datasets studied: flow depth (H)/vegetation height (h) in 1.25 to 3.33, different vegetation densities of a in 1.1 to 18.5 m−1 (a defined as the frontal area of the vegetation per unit volume), and bed slopes in (1.38 - 4.0) × 10−3.