Resumen de Bedload transport of sand-gravel mixtures with antidunes: flume experiments
In this thesis, the interaction between flow and sediment in alluvial channels is studied from an empirical approach, for conditions close or pertaining to supercritical flow, and for four types of sediment: sand, gravel and two mixtures with sand and gravel in a relative proportion of 70-30 and 55-45, respectively. The objective is to obtain by means of laboratory experiments a data set with the characteristics of flow, sediment transport, bed configurations and sediment sorting patterns in sediment mixtures, for different conditions within upper- and transitional-regimes. From a practical perspective, the aim of this work is to reproduce similar conditions to those likely to occur in torrential ephemeral streams, common in the Mediterranean coast and known in Spain as ¿ramblas¿. The experimental work consisted in searching for mobile-bed equilibrium states, for different water discharges and sediment-feed rates. The definitive data set comprises 22 runs, with durations up to 12 hours. Sediment-feed rates were constant during each run, and they were even higher than 1 kg/s. Dominant bed configurations included transitional bedforms and trains of antidunes, coexisting with alternate bars. Antidunes were mostly three-dimensional rather than two-dimensional, and in contrast to the most referred antidunes in literature, the antidunes herein reported moved in the downstream direction and were stable most of the time. Short-crested stationary waves on the water surface accompanied the antidunes. Characterization of the experimental bedforms allowed identifying the range of Froude numbers in which transitional regime prevails for the studied sediment; also, this characterization allowed assessing the performance of theoretical and empirical diagrams for bedform stability phases. It is here demonstrated that for very coarse sand, fine gravel and mixtures of these two materials, plane bed does not occur in the transition from lower- to upper-regime, and if it would occur, it would be restricted to a very narrow range of Froude numbers. Regarding flow resistance related to bedforms in upper-regime, it has been here probed that for similar geometrical conditions, downstream-migrating antidunes produce less flow resistance than dunes, and more flow resistance than upstream-migrating antidunes. An important concern in this work has been to investigate the effect of the relative sand content of sediment in bedforms, flow resistance and sediment transport. It is here demonstrated that bedforms in sand beds can be higher and they can produce much more drag than bedforms in gravel and sand-gravel mixtures. Regarding sediment transport, it is here shown that for the high sediment-feed rates tested in the experiments, certain ranges of sand content would affect sediment mobility. Besides sand content, it is shown that the ratio between sand and gravel grain sizes would also be relevant in the mobility of sediment in comparison to well-sorted material. A conceptual model is suggested for computation of sediment incipient motion, which model is based on the variation of bed porosity with sand content and on the relative size between particles. Some supplementary themes considered in this work include the study of the required conditions for the formation of three-dimensional stationary waves over antidunes; the hydraulic analysis of flow over antidunes and the morphological consequences of such a flow for the three likely regimes of antidune direction of movement; sediment sorting patterns according to sand content, especially bed surface patches of homogeneous sediment; and finally, the analysis of the process by which fine sediment penetrates into a bed composed of particles of diverse sizes.
