Nonuniform sediment transport under non-breaking waves and currents

Abstract

Empirical formulas have been developed to calculate the fractional bed-load and suspended-load transport rates and near-bed suspended-load concentration under non-breaking waves and currents for coastal applications. The formulas relate the bed-load transport rate to the grain shear stress, the suspended-load transport rate to the energy of the flow system, and the near-bed suspended-load concentration to the bed-load transport rate, velocity and layer thickness. Adequate methods are adopted to determine the bed shear stress due to coexisted waves and currents. The hiding and exposure mechanism in nonuniform bed material is considered through a correction factor that is related to the hiding and exposure probabilities and in turn the size composition of bed material. The developed formulas have been tested using a large database of single-sized sediment transport and several sets of multiple-sized sediment transport data collected from literature, and compared with several existing formulas. The developed formulas can provide reasonably good predictions for the test cases.