Velocity profile of turbulent sediment-laden flows in open-channels

In this paper, a study was carried out on the velocity profile of sediment-laden flows in open channels using a two-phase mixture model for two-phase flows. The governing equations for water-sediment mixtures were derived based on the two-fluid equations for solid–liquid two-phase flows. The drift velocity, a key variable involved in the two-phase mixture equations, was derived from the equation of momentum conservation for the solid phase. The drift velocity shows that the inertia of flow, particle turbulence, and collisions effect contribute to the dispersion of the sediment particles in turbulent flows. Using the two-phase mixture equation, the vertical velocity profile of open channel flows was obtained. Further analysis indicated that the distribution of the velocity over depth of water-sediment mixtures, composed of two different phases, is significantly affected by the turbulence of water-sediment mixtures and the density stratification. However, the velocity distribution is also affected by other factors including collisions between particles and particle turbulence as a basic feature of two-phase flows where interphase interactions inevitably mark their influence on the velocity distribution. Comparisons of this approach with observations for a wide range of experimental conditions are presented in this paper, which show that this approach agrees well with the experiments.