Rivers and channels

Rivers and channels are an important part of the natural environment, and play a key role as sources of drinking water.

Cyclops fluorometer in Porter Brook
Cyclops fluorometer in Porter Brook.
Off

Imagine there has been an accidental spill of chemicals in a river, or run-off from a nearby road. There is a growing need to predict concentrations the fate of soluble pollutants once they have entered rivers, as they can impact on the receiving water quality and the ecology.

Natural river bathymetry, combined with the presence of bankside and submerged vegetation creates complex 3D flow fields, restricting the predictive capability of Taylor based longitudinal dispersion coefficients.

The EA Database for Travel Time and Dispersion (Guymer, 2002) collates results from UK river traces. Attempts have been made to relate the longitudinal dispersion coefficient to the properties of the channel, using drainage area, discharge and bed slope. However, the longitudinal dispersion coefficient is poorly predicted based on these easily obtained parameters.


There have been numerous publications relating the longitudinal dispersion coefficient in rivers to the hydraulic and geometric parameters of the flow.

Professor Ian Guymer

The University of Sheffield


To‐date resource requirements have limited full‐scale river traces to only a few reaches under different flow rates (Wallis and Guymer, 2015).

Work at the University of Sheffield is ongoing to record additional full-scale river traces and develop new approaches to describe mixing in rivers and channels.

The main benefits of this research will be the improved representation of transport and mixing of soluble pollutants and microscopic particulates in rivers.

Mixing at the confluence of two rivers.
Mixing at the confluence of two rivers.

Relevant articles and projects

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