Two-Phase Flow Analysis of Concentration Profiles

Abstract

Two-phase flow analysis is used to analyze sediment concentration profiles in uniform open-channel flows over flat, sediment-starved beds that have high concentrations of single-sized sediment. Two-phase flow analysis can explicitly incorporate the effects of particle-particle interactions and particle inertia. Conventional convection-diffusion modeling cannot directly represent these phenomena and are thus limited. Both the two-phase flow formulation and the convection-diffusion modeling are compared against experimental data collected in sediment-starved sediment-laden flows. The two-phase flow model is shown to simulate the effect of both particle-particle interactions and particle inertia in these experimental flows. Simple criteria are given to determine when particle-particle interactions and particle inertia are important in sediment-laden open-channel flows over a flat bed. The current two-phase approach requires empirical formulas of the turbulence quantities and further experimental and analytical work is necessary to develop improved models for the velocity distribution and turbulence quantities.