Fluid forces or impacts: What governs the entrainment of soil particles in sediment transport mediated by a Newtonian fluid?

TL;DR

This study introduces a proxy called 'bed velocity' to determine whether sediment entrainment is primarily caused by fluid forces or particle impacts, revealing impact entrainment's dominance in most regimes.

Contribution

The paper proposes the 'bed velocity' as a new measure to distinguish impact versus fluid entrainment in sediment transport, challenging previous assumptions about the dominance of fluid forces.

Findings

Impact entrainment dominates when Impact number > 20 or Shields number > 5/Impact number.

Fluid entrainment is only significant in viscous bedload transport at low Impact and Shields numbers.

Transport rate scaling with Shields number is not solely due to impact entrainment, especially in turbulent bedload.

Abstract

In steady sediment transport, sediment deposition is balanced by entrainment of bed particles by fluid forces or particle-bed impacts. Here we propose a proxy to determine the role of impact entrainment relative to entrainment by the mean turbulent flow: the "bed velocity" $V_b$, which is an effective near-bed-surface value of the average horizontal particle velocity that generalizes the classical slip velocity, used in studies of aeolian saltation transport, to sediment transport in an arbitrary Newtonian fluid. We study $V_b$ for a wide range of the particle-fluid-density ratio $s$, Galileo number $\mathrm{Ga}$, and Shields number $\Theta$ using direct sediment transport simulations. We find that transport is fully sustained through impact entrainment (i.e., $V_b$ is constant in natural units) when the "impact number" $\mathrm{Im}=\mathrm{Ga}\sqrt{s+0.5}\gtrsim20$ or $\Theta\gtrsim5/\mathrm{Im}$. These conditions are obeyed for the vast majority of transport regimes, including steady turbulent bedload, which has long been thought to be sustained solely through fluid entrainment. In fact, we find that transport is fully sustained through fluid entrainment (i.e., $V_b$ scales with the near-bed horizontal fluid velocity) only for sufficiently viscous bedload transport at grain scale (i.e., for $\mathrm{Im}\lesssim20$ and $\Theta\lesssim1/\mathrm{Im}$). Finally, we do not find a strong correlation between, $V_b$, or the classical slip velocity, and the transport-layer-averaged horizontal particle velocity $\overline{v_x}$, which challenges the long-standing consensus that predominant impact entrainment is responsible for a linear scaling of the transport rate with $\Theta$. For turbulent bedload in particular, $\overline{v_x}$ increases with $\Theta$ despite $V_b$ remaining constant, which we propose is linked to the formation of a liquid-like bed on top of the static-bed surface.