References

ADGEO

Advances in Geosciences

ADGEO

Adv. Geosci.

1680-7359

Copernicus Publications

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/adgeo-37-1-2013

Tracer dispersion in bedload transport

Lajeunesse

¹ Devauchelle

¹ Houssais

¹ Seizilles

Institut de Physique du Globe – Sorbonne Paris Cité, Équipe de Dynamique des fluides géologiques, 1 rue Jussieu, 75238 Paris cedex 05, France

17 12 2013

37 1 6

2013

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Bedload particles entrained by rivers tends to disperse as they move downstream. In this paper, we use the erosion-deposition model of Charru et al. (2004) to describe the velocity and the spreading of a plume of tracer particles. We restrict our analysis to steady-state transport above a flat bed of uniform sediment. The transport of tracer particles is then controlled by downstream advection and particle exchange with the immobile bed. After a transitional regime dominated by initial conditions, the evolution of a plume of markers tends asymptotically towards classical advection-diffusion: its average position grows linearly with time, whereas it spreads like the square root of time.

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