Approach to Separate Sand from Gravel for Bed-Load Transport Calculations in Streams with Bimodal Sediment

Abstract

The bed material found in gravel-bed streams is nonuniform in terms of grain size and can typically be classified as unimodal or bimodal. The latter type of sediment distribution is usually represented by two modes, one of sand size and another of gravel. For this case, the movement of one mode becomes nonlinearly influenced by the other. As a result, the presence of the two modes in a bimodal material complicates the calculation of bed-load transport rates. The present study proposes an approach to separate the calculation of bed-load transport rates for bimodal materials into two independent fractions of sand and gravel, thereby rendering the bed sediment into two unimodal components. This approach is accomplished by decoupling the two fractions through scaling the reference Shields stresses of the sand and gravel modes to match the value of the mode of unimodal materials. Consequently, the contribution of each fraction to bed load can be estimated using a suitable relation derived for unimodal materials. Laboratory and field bed-load data available in the literature are used to examine the validity of the overall approach.