Velocity fields and particle trajectories for bed load over subaqueous barchan dunes

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental investigation of moving grains over subaqueous barchan dunes that consisted of spherical glass beads of known granulometry. Prior to each test run, a pre-determined quantity of grains was poured inside a closed conduit, and the grains settled on its bottom wall forming one conical heap. As different turbulent water flows were imposed, each heap evolved to a barchan dune, which was filmed with a high-speed camera. An image processing code was written to identify some of the moving grains and compute their velocity fields and trajectories. Our results show that the velocity of grains varies along the barchan dune, with higher velocities occurring close to the dune centroid, and that grains trajectories are intermittent. Depending on the region over the dune, we found that the velocity fields present values within 1 and 10 % of the cross-sectional mean velocity of the fluid. Considering the average trajectories of grains moving over a given dune, their mean displacement varies within 30 and 60 grain diameters and their characteristic velocities within 10 and 20 % of the cross-sectional mean velocity of the fluid. The displacement time varies between 30 and 90 % of the settling time, and it seems to have two asymptotic behaviors: one close to bed load inception and other far from it. When compared with bed load over a plane bed, we observe that grains have the same mean velocity, but they travel distances up to 5 times larger, with higher densities of moving grains.