Experimental Study on Bedload Transport and Bedforms: Behaviour and Interplay in Steep Turbulent Streams

In mountain regions, steep streams play an important role in water and sediment connectivity. In these highly dynamic systems, water flow features, sediment fluxes and stream morphologies are tightly interlinked over a broad range of temporal and spatial scales. Understanding their interactions is key to forecast, prevent and mitigate the impacts of stream-related hazards on human population and facilities as well as to manage the resources connected to the rivers. Sediment clasts at rest on the bed surface may be eroded, transported and deposited by the water flow. Grains that move in rolling and saltation regimes close to the bed compose the 'bedload', which is considered the main mode of sediment transport when studying morphodynamics of mountain rivers. The fate of these particles is of primary interest for river scientists and engineers as bedload predominantly drives the river morphology evolution and responds to it in a complex manner. Therefore, measuring and predicting bedload transport rates are fundamental concerns for many works of research and applications. Bedload transport rates may exhibit large non-Gaussian fluctuations, even under steady-state conditions, especially when bedload transport intensity is weak. These fluctuations may originate from different phenomena and affect the accuracy of bedload transport rate estimates. Particles transported by the water flow can destabilise other particles at rest on the bed surface. Under weak bedload transport conditions, this positive feedback can lead to large bedload pulses. When grains settle, they often organise in small clusters or larger bedforms. Bedform migration has been identified as one of the potential causes of bedload transport fluctuations. Trains of upstream-migrating antidunes may develop in steep coarse-bedded streams when the water discharge is sufficiently high to ensure fully supercritical flow conditions. In this dissertation, I present an experimental investigation on the behaviour of bedload transport fluctuations and antidunes in steep supercritical flows. The experiments were conducted in narrow flumes under well-controlled conditions with high-resolution image-based bedload transport and bed topography monitoring. The dependence of mean bedload transport rate uncertainty on the averaging time interval was analysed. Furthermore, I performed experimental runs with increasing transport intensity and a nearly constant mean bed slope angle to study how antidune sequences composed by bedforms of variable shape typically responded to the mean bedload flux imposed under steady-state conditions. Spectral analysis of the bed elevation perturbation in time and space allowed us to quantify the variability ranges of antidune shape and celerity. Scaling the spectra with opportune reference scales made it possible to identify a consistent dimensionless relationship between antidune geometry and migration celerity, which includes the dependencies on flow and sediment supply forcings. I studied how the bedload transport rate fluctuates in presence of migrating bedforms. The effects on the bedload transport rate periodicity due to non-uniformities in the antidune migration period and to deviations from the steady-state transport conditions were also investigated. This work is a further step on the way towards a complete understanding of the interplay between bedload transport fluctuations and bedforms in mountain streams.