Dramatic decrease in suspended sediment concentration carried by hyper-concentrated flood in the Lower Yellow River, China

Author(s):  
L He
Author(s):  
Qian Dai ◽  
Hongxian Shan ◽  
Yonggang Jia ◽  
Xiangmei Meng ◽  
Honglei Li ◽  
...  

In order to find a simple, continuous method to determine the suspended sediment concentration in a high turbidity region, experiments were conducted to look for relationships between suspended sediment concentration and electrical conductivity. Sediments were sampled from the Yellow River Delta and a conductivity sensor was used to measure the electrical conductivity of different sediment content seawater. The influencing factors such as temperature and salinity are also investigated. The results show that good linear relationships exist between suspended sediment concentration and electrical conductivity; salinity and temperature have some influence on electrical conductivity, and salinity is the most important influencing factor and temperature takes the second place. Basically, the general linear regression formulas between suspended sediment concentration and electrical conductivity can be drawn with variable salinity and temperature. The relationships suggest that it is feasible to measure suspended sediment concentration in situ using electrical conductivity sensors.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Huan Jing ◽  
Deyu Zhong ◽  
Hongwu Zhang

<p>The channel geometry in a fluvial river is significantly affected by the flow and sediment regimes, and the response behavior of channel dimensions usually varies widely to different management strategies from the upstream reservoir. Therefore, it is significantly crucial to investigate the variation of the channel geometry in response to changing flow and sediment conditions and quantify the influence of the latter in the sedimentation reduction and flood releasing in lower reaches downstream of the dam. In this study, three laboratory experiments on the physical model covering the typical braided reach HGK—JHT downstream of the Xiaolangdi Reservoir in the lower Yellow River are carried out, under the discharge of 2000 m<sup>3</sup>/s, 3000 m<sup>3</sup>/s, and 4000 m<sup>3</sup>/s respectively and with the corresponding constant suspended sediment concentration of 8.0 kg/m<sup>3</sup>. Results indicate that (i) spatially, the erosion and deposition in studied channel reach distributed alternately along the course which performs typical evolution properties of the braided river, corresponding to the total erosion amount of 2.27×10<sup>6 </sup>m<sup>3</sup>, 10.29×10<sup>6</sup> m<sup>3</sup>, and 7.98×10<sup>6</sup> m<sup>3</sup> for three magnitude of discharges; and (ii) four representative adjustment patterns are listed based on the observed cross-sectional geometry after each experiment, including the lateral widening pattern, vertical incision pattern, composite pattern and geometrical stable pattern where sectional geometry rarely changes during the period of experiment; and (iii) the quantity <em>ξ=B</em><sup>1/2</sup>/<em>H</em> where <em>B</em> and <em>H</em> is the width and depth of the main channel zone is selected as the typical indicator to determine the variation of the channel stability. It is discovered that <em>ξ </em>in the reaches upstream of section FJS have rather larger values, implying relatively wider and shallower sectional geometry and lower channel stability which is closely associated with the levee safety. And moreover, the quantity <em>ξ </em>generally has lower values, that is, higher channel stability with the increase of experiment discharge; Besides, through the method of nonlinear regression analysis, the empirical relations for HGK—JHT Reach are developed between the main channel dimensions and incoming flow erosion intensity <em>F</em>=(<em>Q</em><sup>2</sup>/<em>S</em>)/10<sup>6</sup> where <em>Q</em> is the discharge and <em>S</em> is the corresponding sediment concentration. In general, the calculated results are generally consistent with the measured values, as the riverbed degradation and the variation of sectional area increase exponentially with a stronger erosion intensity <em>F</em>.This paper may provide some practical basis for the study of channel evolution in sediment-laden rivers.</p>


2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (5) ◽  
pp. 04016010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hong Wei Fang ◽  
Rui Xun Lai ◽  
Bin Liang Lin ◽  
Xing Ya Xu ◽  
Fang Xiu Zhang ◽  
...  

Water ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaofei Liu ◽  
Changxing Shi ◽  
Yuanyuan Zhou ◽  
Zhenkui Gu ◽  
Huijuan Li

River channel change can be very sensitive to environmental change and human activities and it has been one of the main research topics in fluvial geomorphology. In this study, repeated channel geometric measurements were used to investigate the channel adjustment to water and sediment changes of the lower Yellow River in China in the past few decades. With a high sediment concentration and large variations of water discharge, the lower Yellow River has a much active channel in its form and location, which has hindered previous research efforts to study long-term differentiated erosion/deposition of different geomorphic units in the channel. In this study, we divided each of four typical channel across-sections at hydrological stations in the lower Yellow River into different units according to the geomorphological features, and give a detailed investigation of erosion/deposition processes of these geomorphic units and the interactions between them besides the influence of incoming water and sediment conditions. The results show that with a significant decreasing trend of both the annual runoff and sediment load of the river and abrupt changes in 1985–1996, the overall siltation trend in the river channel before 1990 had been replaced by a slight erosion trend after 2006. In the earlier period, the siltation in the upstream wandering and transitional reaches mainly occurred on floodplains and that in the downstream straight reaches principally on main channel bed. In the later period, erosion occurred mainly on high and low bank slopes in the wandering reaches and on main channel bed in the transitional reaches. The erosion became weak in the wandering reaches after 2010, continued in the transitional reaches, and was still relatively minor in the straight reaches, reflecting the downstream hysteresis channel response to changes in water and sediment discharges down dams. Our results suggest that the seasonal erosion/deposition of a geomorphic unit of the river channel can be attributed to the changes in water and sediment discharges as well as to the interaction between geomorphic units. Siltation on the main channel bed could be attributed to erosion on the bank slopes in both the sections in the wandering and transitional reaches, and erosion of the main channel bed in flood seasons was negatively related with the mean water discharge at the two sections in the straight reaches. This result implies that fixing the bank slopes in the wandering and transitional reaches and raising the water discharge in the straight reach in flood seasons are favorable options for controlling the development of the two-level perching channel of the lower Yellow River.


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