Hydraulic size of non-spherical solid particles

Abstract

The paper studies impact of determining the diameter of solid particles on the calculation of the hydraulic particle size in the water flow. The relevance of the topic is also connected with the use of calculation of hydraulic size in hydraulic engineering in forecasting: downstream erosion, the formation of shoals, canals, bottom spillages, etc. Most of the empirical formulas for calculating the hydraulic particle size are applicable to spherical particles. However, the nature of the solid particles rarely has a spherical shape. The aim of this work is to investigate experimentally the dependence of the hydraulic size of the diameter of the solid particles. Different approaches to determining the diameter solid particles are analyzed, as for non-spherical particles finding the diameter is an independent and complex problem. For the experimental research solid particles of different shapes and sizes were used. The diameter is included in the empirical formulas for hydraulic size linearly, and to the power of 2 or 0.5. Therefore, the dependence of the experimental hydraulic size on the diameter was correlated with the corresponding functions. The shape of the particle significantly affects the value of the hydraulic size and depends on the diameter to the power of (0.5).