Introducing a Relationship for Estimation of the Sediment Transport Rate through Rockfill Structures

Abstract

Rockfill dams are accounted as useful measures in watershed management projects. How-ever, the sediment transport through the rockfill materials, could impact their lifetime duration. Previously, researches have been conducted to describe the various hydraulically issues of the flow passing through these structures However; there is no general relationship to estimate the sediment transport rate passing through the of rockfill structures. In this research, by using several sets of data provided from three various sources, we introduced a more general rela-tionship to estimate the sediment transport passing through the rock materials. We compared the predicted results from the new equation with those estimated from the other equations. We found that the accuracy of the new relationships is much more than previously introduced equ-ations. Using more measured data, we found that the mean relative error of the predicted re-sults is %21 showing the reasonable accuracy of the present relationship.