Research project

Professor Colin Thorne, University of Nottingham
Dr Carlos Alonso, United States Department of Agriculture
Dr Andrew Simon, United States Department of Agriculture

This is a five-year Specific Cooperative Agreement between the USDA-Agricultural Research Service and the University of Nottingham. It is the only such agreement involving the National Sedimentation Laboratory and a foreign university. The funding is not set at any prescribed level, but is reviewed annually, with further monies being added to the SCA according to the research need and opportunities for cost-sharing.

The objective of the project is to improve our understanding of hydraulic and geotechnical processes operating at the bank toe of retreating streambanks and to use this understanding to develop more accurate numerical algorithms for predicting bank-toe erosion, bank stability and width adjustment in alluvial channels. This research will help to develop strategies for watershed management and to evaluate conservation effects where channel processes are important.

This will be achieved through field and laboratory experimentation on fluvial entrainment of bank-toe materials which consists of: (A) improved evaluation of shear stress in the near-bank region; (B) improved evaluation of the critical shear stress of in situ and re-worked bank-toe materials; and (C) analysis of the excess shear-stress equation with archived and newly-acquired data to determine the variability and controls of its exponent.

Chris Parker (student, university of Nottingham) uses a bore hole shear tester to investigate soil properties in an eroding streambank in the Goodwin Creek experimental catchment near Oxford, Mississippi.

Colin Thorne and Sebastian Bentley measure pore water pressures in the eroding face of an edge of field gully in the Goodwin Creek experiment al catchment near Oxford Mississippi.

Seb Bentley (student, university of Nottingham) collects a soil core for testing with help from staff of the USDA-ARS National Sedimentation Laboratory during cooperative research in the coldwater River catchment near Oxford, Mississippi.

Research outcomes include undergraduate dissertations and postgraduate theses, ARS Research Reports, Conference contributions and papers submitted to academic and professional journals.

United States Department of Agriculture: Agricultural Research Service
http://www.ars.usda.gov/main/main.htm

Interaction of Hydraulics and Geotechnical Processes in Controlling Bank Stability