Intense sediment transport: Collisional to turbulent suspension

A recent simple analytical approach to the problem of steady, uniform transport of sediment by a turbulent shearing fluid dominated by interparticle collisions is extended to the case in which the mean turbulent lift may partially or totally support the weight of the sediment. We treat the granular–fluid mixture as a continuum and make use of constitutive relations of kinetic theory of granular gases to model the particle phase and a simple mixing-length approach for the fluid. We focus on pressure-driven flows over horizontal, erodible beds and divide the flow itself into layers, each dominated by different physical mechanisms. This permits a crude analytical integration of the governing equations and to obtain analytical expressions for the distribution of particle concentration and velocity. The predictions of the theory are compared with existing laboratory measurements on the flow of glass spheres and sand particles in water. We also show how to build a regime map to distinguish between collisional, turbulent-collisional, and fully turbulent suspensions.