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Role of turbulent kinetic energy modulation by particle–fluid interaction in sediment pick-up

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2023

Geert H. Keetels*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 2, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands
Julien Chauchat
Affiliation:
Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, LEGI, 38000 Grenoble, France
Wim-Paul Breugem
Affiliation:
Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Mekelweg 2, 2628 CD Delft, The Netherlands
*
†Email address for correspondence: g.h.keetels@tudelft.nl

Abstract

Reliable prediction of the erosion rate of sediment beds is important for many applications in coastal and river engineering. Theoretical understanding of empirically derived scaling relations is still lacking. This applies in particular for the scaling anomaly between low and high Shields number conditions. In this work, the erosion process is studied from the perspective of the phase-averaged turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) equations. The multi-phase TKE equations are written in a form that allows for a direct comparison with the TKE equation that appears for a stratified single-phase flow under the Boussinesq approximation. This reveals that next to buoyancy destruction, several other TKE modulation mechanisms become important at high Shields numbers and concentrations. Two scaling laws are derived for both moderate and high Shields numbers, and are tested against a wide range of experimental data.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press
Figure 0

Figure 1. Definition sketch of pick-up flux $E_p$, settling flux $S$, and total particle flux $F$.

Figure 1

Table 1. Parameter ranges in the erosion experiments ($d_{50}$, $v_p^\infty$, $u_*$), corresponding dimensionless numbers ($\theta$, $D_*$), entry flow at erosion measurement section being either clear-water flow (CWF) or hyper-concentrated flow (HCF), and typical concentrations in the near-bed region $\alpha _r$.

Figure 2

Figure 2. Scaling anomaly in the normalized pick-up flux and Shields number between CWF and HCF cases. CWF experiments: Van Rijn (1984), Okayasu et al. (2010) and Cheng & Emadzadeh (2016). HCF experiments: Winterwerp et al. (1992) and Bisschop (2018).

Figure 3

Figure 3. Constraint on the ratio between the Osmidov length scale $l_B$ and the Kolmogorov scale $l_\eta$. Increasing the pick-up flux results in a reduction of $l_B$ by buoyancy until a critical value $l_B/l_\eta$ (i.e. $Re_b$) is reached. This argument corresponds to scaling (2.14).

Figure 4

Figure 4. Constraint on the ratio between the Osmidov length scale $l_B$ and the particle size $d_p$. Increasing the pick-up flux results in a reduction of $l_B$ by buoyancy until a critical value $l_B/d_p$ is reached. This line of reasoning results in scaling (2.16).

Figure 5

Figure 5. Energy flows between PE, MKE, TKE, granular temperature $\varTheta _p$, temperature of the particles $T_p$, pseudo-TKE $\varTheta _f$ (turbulence in the wake of the particles) and temperature of the fluid $T_f$, where $e$ is the coefficient of restitution between the particles, $\epsilon _f$ is the viscous dissipation of fluid TKE, $\epsilon _p$ is the granular dissipation of particle TKE, and $\epsilon _D$ is the small-scale viscous dissipation associated with pseudo-turbulence (Fox 2014).

Figure 6

Figure 6. Obukhov length over channel height versus the Shields parameter. The dashed vertical line indicates the region ($\theta < 0.15$) where the pick-up probability of a single grain strongly influences the pick-up rate.

Figure 7

Figure 7. Ratio of the terminal settling velocity and friction velocity plotted against the Shields parameter to identify the expected transport mode. Symbols are as defined in figure 2. The horizontal lines indicate the threshold values for the different transports (Dey 2014).

Figure 8

Figure 8. Near-bed concentration versus Stokes number (see (2.1)), measured at (a) $1$ cm and (b) $3$ cm height above the bed; data of Bisschop (2018). Symbols are as defined in figure 2. The dashed line represents a least squares regression for both heights separately, $\left \langle \alpha \right \rangle =0.41\,St^{0.20}$. The dash-dotted line is a least squares regression for the combined measurements at $1$ and $3$ cm height above the bed.

Figure 9

Figure 9. Measured pick-up flux versus computed pick-up flux using (a) (2.14) and (b) (2.16). The Shields parameter falls in the range $0.15<\theta <1.36$ for the selected data points. The outer dashed lines indicate a 30 % error margin.

Figure 10

Figure 10. Scaling of the pick-up flux at a high Shields number $\theta >8.7$ of Bisschop (2018) and data points obtained from Winterwerp et al. (1992). Pick-up flux (a) evaluated at a fixed reference height $y_r=3$ cm above the bed ($y_r/h=0.15$) as in Bisschop (2018), and (b) evaluated at a fixed non-dimensional reference height $St=1$ or $y_r=t_pu_*/\kappa$ and $\left \langle \alpha \right \rangle _r=0.41$. The dashed line indicates perfect correlation.

Figure 11

Table 2. Conversion relations between averages.