Suspended Sediment Concentration Distribution of Flow over Vegetated Sand Bed

Abstract

Hydraulics in vegetated streams increasingly becomes important for designing comfortable river environments. In this study, suspended sediment transport is investigated. Firstly, the turbulent structure of open channel flow over a vegetated bed is studied by means of both experiments and numerical analysis based on k-A turbulence model. Secondly, the turbulent flux of suspended sediment is estimated by assuming a similarity between the change of turbulent flux distribution of suspended sediment due to the presence of a vegetated layer and that of turbulent momentum flux (Reynolds-stress distribution). Based on the above, the concentration distribution of suspended sediment of flow in a vegetated-bed channel is predicted against the vegetation density.