SHEETFLOW SEDIMENT TRANSPORT UNDER SKEWED - ASYMMETRIC WAVES AND CURRENTS

Abstract

Prototype scale laboratory experiments have been conducted to investigate the sheetflow sediment transport of uniform sands under different skewed-asymmetric oscillatory flows. Experimental results reveal that in most of the case with fine sand, the “cancelling effect”, which balances the on-/off-shore net transport under pure asymmetric/skewed flows and results a moderate net transport, was developed for combined skewed-asymmetric flow. However, under some certain conditions (T > 5s) with coarse sands, the onshore sediment transport was enhanced by 50% under combined skewed-asymmetric flows. Sand transport mechanism under oscillatory sheetflow conditions is also studied by comparing the maximum bed shear stress and the phase lag parameter at each half cycle. A comparison of measurements including the new experimental data with a number of practical sand transport formulations shows that the Dong et al. (2013) formulation performs the best in predicting the measured net transport rates over a wide range of experimental conditions