• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.321-335
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• 2023

Monitoring sediment loads in natural rivers is the key process in river engineering, but it is costly and dangerous. In practice, suspended loads are directly measured, and total loads, which is a summation of suspended loads and bed loads, are estimated. This study proposes a real-time sediment discharge monitoring system using the horizontal acoustic Doppler current profiler (H-ADCP) and support vector regression (SVR). The proposed system is comprised of the SVR model for suspended sediment concentration (SVR-SSC) and for total loads (SVR-Q_TL), respectively. SVR-SSC estimates SSC and SVR-Q_TL mimics the modified Einstein procedure. The grid search with K-fold cross validation (Grid-CV) and the recursive feature elimination (RFE) were employed to determine SVR's hyperparameters and input variables. The two SVR models showed reasonable cross-validation scores (R²) with 0.885 (SVR-SSC) and 0.860 (SVR-Q_TL). During the time-series sediment load monitoring period, we successfully detected various sediment transport phenomena in natural streams, such as hysteresis loops and sensitive sediment fluctuations. The newly proposed sediment monitoring system depends only on the gauged features by H-ADCP without additional assumptions in hydraulic variables (e.g., friction slope and suspended sediment size distribution). This method can be applied to any ADCP-installed discharge monitoring station economically and is expected to enhance temporal resolution in sediment monitoring.

• Journal of Korean Society of Coastal and Ocean Engineers
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• v.31 no.5
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• pp.320-333
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• 2019

In this study, a physics-based 3D morphology model for the estimation of an erosion rate of nourished beach is newly proposed. As a hydrodynamic module, IHFOAM toolbox having its roots on the OpenFoam is used. On the other hand, the morphology model comprised a transport equation for suspended sediment, and Exner type equation derived from the viewpoint of sediment budget with the bed load being taken to accounted. In doing so, the incipient motion of sediment is determined based on the Shields Diagram, while the bottom suspended sediment concentration, the bed load transport rate is figured out using the bottom shearing stress directly calculated from the numerically simulated flow field rather than the conventional quadratic law and frictional coefficient. In order to verify the proposed morphology model, we numerically simulate the nonlinear shoaling, breaking over the uniform beach of 1/m slope, and its ensuing morphology change. Numerical results show that the partially skewed, and asymmetric bottom shearing stresses can be successfully simulated. It was shown that sediments suspended and eroded at the foreshore by wave breaking are gradually drifted toward a shore and accumulated in the process of up-rush, which eventually leads to the formation of swash bar. It is also worth mentioning that the breaker bar formed by the sediments dragged by the back-wash flow which commences at the pinnacle of up-rush as the back-wash flow gets weakened due to the increased depth was successfully duplicated in the numerical simulation.