Transitional sediment concentration profiles

Abstract

An important problem of the theory of nonequilibrium sediment transport is shown in Figure 1. It arises when a fully developed, steady, two-dimensional turbulent stream of clean water flowing over a rigid apron moves over a flat erodible bed and starts interacting with the cohesionless uniform sand of the bed. Beginning at the edge of the erodible bed, sediment particles commence diffusion into the bulk of the turbulent flow, making the concentration of the suspended solids increase in the downstream direction up to a distance where the vertical sediment concentration distribution becomes invariant.