Roughness Effects of Subaquaeous Ripples and Dunes

Abstract

Numerous questions and problems on Earth and questions with respect to other planets arise from morphodynamic processes caused by sediment movements driven by flows of fluids, such as water, air and other gases. A sediment surface opposes the current with a resistance that is determined by its skin or grain roughness. As soon as sand waves, such as ripples and/or dunes, are formed, these bedforms cause a further resistance to the flow, the so-called form roughness. Dependent on the dimensions of the ripples and dunes, the form roughness can be much more pronounced than the skin roughness. The relevant literature provides a large number of solution approaches based on different basic ideas and different result quality. The aim of this paper is a comparative analysis of solution approaches from the literature. For this purpose, 14 approaches to bedform-related friction in the subaqueous case are evaluated using 637 measurements from laboratory and natural settings. We found that all approaches were significantly more accurate for ripples than for dunes. Since this was equally the case for all approaches tested, it is reasonable to assume that this is caused by measurement inaccuracies for dunes in the natural case rather than due to the approaches themselves. The approach of Engelund 1977 proved to be most accurate among all approaches investigated here. It is based on the Borda–Carnot formulation and an additional empirical term. An analytical derivation and justification is provided for this additional term.