Deposition behaviour of inclined momentum sediment-laden jet

Abstract

As wastewater is commonly disposed of in the form of sediment-laden jet from a submarine outfall, the sediment movement when the jet evolves in the ambient water and its final deposition are of great importance to marine engineers. This study aims to investigate the settling mechanism of the sediment from an inclined discharge nozzle and quantify the deposition profile for various jet conditions in the hydrostatic environment through physical experiments and dimensional analysis. In the experimental tests, separate flow visualizations for the fluid and sediment phases are achieved to enable the simultaneous observation of sediment particles and jet fluid movement, through which the analysis of the relationship between the fluid and the sediment movement is carried out. The results show that at locations close to the nozzle (s/D = 5), sediment mean velocity has an inverse relationship with the turbulence intensity while positively correlated with the initial jet momentum. The discharge angle is found to have dominant effect on alternating the sediment velocity profile from symmetrical to asymmetrical. With the newly defined momentum settling length scale lmi, the non-dimensional formulations for deposition rate and accumulated deposition profile involving the nozzle inclination have been validated by the experimental data and are potential to be applied to the prediction of depositional rate and final deposition distribution near the outfall for the full-scale wastewater discharge events.