EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON THE CHARACTERISTICS OF BRAIDED CHANNEL FLOW

Abstract

In the Hii river, the flood way is being constructed for the reduction of flood discharge. The river channel is braided and curved in the neighborhood of the diversion point, and we are interested in the river bed change due to the flood. In this paper, experimental study were conducted to examine the flow characteristics of the curved braided channel.
Under the experimental condition, initially 4-mode braided channel-bed configurations appeared and successively 2-mode ones are formed. Photographs were taken of the flow surface under these conditions. The obtained photographs are analyzed by correlation method to obtain velocity vectors over the whole surface and the distribution of the divergence, vorticity, and streamlines are examined. Thus, the flow characteristics under 4-mode bedconfigurations were shown quite different from 2-mode ones.