Hydraulic Modeling of Bed Load Transport in Gravel-Bed Laba River

Abstract

On the basis of a field study of a piedmont braided reach of the gravel-bed Laba River, in the northern Caucasus, Russia, an undistorted 1:50 scale mobile bed hydraulic model was constructed in an outdoor experimental plot of the State Hydrological Institute, St. Petersburg, Russia. Channel and hydraulic regimes of the Laba River were studied in this model. Attention was paid to the regime of bed load transport and its relation to the hydraulic characteristics of the flow. The same problems were investigated in an 100 m long, 1 m wide flume with glass walls also located at the State Hydrological Institute, and in an 18 m long, 2.46 m wide steel tilting flume at HR Wallingford Ltd., U.K. Quantitative characteristics of bed load transport were obtained from the laboratory experiments and compared with the field data. Proximity of the field and scaled up laboratory data demonstrates that the processes of bed load transport of gravel-bed rivers can be faithfully reproduced in small-scale models and flumes.