Roughness of stable, armored gravel beds

The grain roughness of stable armored beds that formed in a laboratory flume under a range of steady flow conditions on rounded, flat and angular gravel is analyzed. Gravel roughness geometry is determined from bed surface profiles and vertical photographs. These techniques have been employed in field situations. Thus the methodology is potentially applicable to the analysis of grain roughness in natural gravel bed channels. The description of representative roughness geometry is also analogous to that used to characterize artificial roughness arrays. Armor roughness increases with increasing flow. Armored surfaces composed of angular gravel are roughest, and surfaces formed of flat gravel offer least resistance to the flow. Stable armored beds may exhibit a tendency to maximize the ratio of the shear due to drag on representative roughness elements to total shear. Roughness concentration is strongly correlated with the energy slope, and there is a linear increase in equivalent roughness height with increasing roughness concentration. The friction factor for an armored surface varies in a linear manner with representative roughness geometry. The equation defining this relation is probably similar to that used to characterize variations in the friction factor with artificial roughness geometry at low roughness concentrations. However, to reconcile the relations for artificial and natural roughness completely, it may be necessary to explicitly consider the contribution to flow resistance made by roughness shape, background roughness, and blocking in shallow flows.