Author(s): Yi Yuan; Alan Cuthbertson; Tom Eaves
Linked Author(s): Alan J S Cuthbertson
Keywords: Hindered settling; Consolidation; Flow transition; Cohesive sediment
Abstract: In low-energy aquatic environments like estuaries and sheltered coastal inlets, sedimentation processes for cohesive muds (e.g. clays and organic matter) play a crucial role in defining morphodynamic evolution. Hence, physical understanding the fluid-soil regime transitions for cohesive sediments (i.e. from hindered settling to consolidation) is vital to many marine engineering applications such as dredging for port and harbour maintenance, navigable depth measurement, and land reclamation. This study aims to develop a new physics-based framework to analyse the sedimentation of clay suspensions under hydrostatic conditions, where the degree of compaction depends primarily on the initial suspended sediment mass. Previous models for hindered settling and consolidation of cohesive sediments have either not accounted fully for fluid-soil regime transition (Kynch, 1952) or have included additional phenomenological transitional regimes between hindered settling and consolidation (Dankers and Winterwerp, 2007). As such, a two-phase sedimentation model based on Paterson et al. (2019) has been calibrated and applied successfully to the full sedimentation process for clay suspensions, demonstrating consistency with new experimental results reported herein.
Year: 2025