Department of Agriculture
Dataset Description
This dataset includes the data in the figures for the article entitled "The effect of a bimodal gravel size distribution on clean-out depth of sand", which is to be published in the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering. The authors are: Kuhnle, R. A., Smith, J. E., Wren, D. G., and Langendoen, E. L.
The clogging of the gravel surface layer in gravel-bedded channels with finer sediment (< 2 mm) is a common problem that negatively impacts stream bed habitat quality. Most existing measurements of surface layer sediment clean-out depth are from experiments with narrow gravel size distributions; therefore, a new set of experiments was conducted to explore the effect of widely distributed bimodal gravel fractions on the clean-out depth of interstitial sand. Experiments were used to measure the terminal clean-out depth of 0.136 mm sand from bed material substrates composed of unimodal median diameter gravel of 7.16 mm and bimodal bed material with modes of 7.31 and 34.66 mm and a median diameter of 33.46 mm. It was found that the clean-out depth of sand from immobile gravel beds could be predicted by scaling the bed shear stress using the cumulative probability distribution of the elevations of the surface of the gravel bed.
Organization: Department of Agriculture
Organization URL: https://catalog.data.gov/organization/usda
Last updated: 2025-11-21
Tags: gravel cleanout, gravel roughness, sediment transport, shear stress modulation