Turbulence structure and “Monami” phenomena in flexible vegetated open-channel flows

Abstract

Aquatic plants in natural rivers are essentially important components of ecosystems. In vegetated canopy open-channel flow, velocity profiles are changed largely in the vertical direction resulting in the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. Consequently, large-scale organized vortices are induced, which dominate the momentum transfer and scalar concentration among canopies. The downstream advection of coherent vortices causes the coherent waving of aquatic vegetation, referred to as Monami. However, the flow-visualization techniques such as PIV have not been sufficiently applied to these complicated flows in previous studies, such that no detailed information on the interaction between the flow field and the plant motion exists. Simultaneous measurements of turbulence and vegetation motion were conducted herein for open-channel flows with flexible vegetation by using a combination of PIV and PTV techniques. The former part of this study focuses on the effects of Monami phenomena on mean-flow and turbulence structures. The latter part examines an interaction between the coherent structure and the vegetation motion.

Keywords:

• Coherent structure
• flexible vegetation
• momentum transport
• Monami phenomena
• turbulence