Influence of Inter-Particle Distance, Entrapped Water Volume and Salinity of Water on the Escape Velocity of Particles on a Riverbank

Sanchayan Mukherjee, Asis MazumdarP

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DOI: 10.4236/eng.2011.37092                

Abstract

The mechanism of erosion of a riverbank is not easy to analyze and each sediment particle is under influence of number of forces. Among all these forces, force of cohesion between the particles plays a very dominant and significant role, and, till date, not much progress has been made to analyze this force in a deterministic manner. A particle is bound to its neighboring particles under this force of cohesion. In this paper, the analysis of forces acting on a particle on a riverbank has been made with a model called the Truncated Pyramid Model. A particle requires a certain velocity to escape from the riverbank and determination of the escape velocity can pave the way for finding out other parameters like entrainment rate, erosion coefficient and so on. Calculation and estimation of riverbank erosion rate is an important aspect of river basin management. In this paper it has been shown that the escape velocity is dependent on certain micro-level parameters like inter-particle distance and volume of the water bridge between two adjacent particles. Also, for saline water the particle requires less velocity to escape compared to the pure-water scenario. The findings of the present paper exactly fall in line with the results of another paper where the researchers showed that cohesive force between the particles decreases as water turns from pure to impure.

Keywords

Cohesive Force, Escape Velocity, Water Bridge, Inter-Particle Distance, Surface Tension, Truncated Pyramid Model

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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