Manufacturing of Small-Scale Flume to Assess the Riverbank's Settlement

This paper includes designing, manufacturing, and testing a flume apparatus to simulate hydraulic and geotechnical problems occurring in natural rivers and open channels. The length of the flume is 247 cm, 80 cm wide, and 44 cm in height. The device's design was tested under physical modeling conditions by studying the failure mechanism that occurs in riverbanks as a result of the effect of water flow velocity in short-term and long-term flow duration and the type of soil used. Many laboratory tests were initially conducted to determine the properties of the soil sample. Then by applying specific limits of velocity, it was possible to determine the failure mechanism that occurs under these conditions, which has shown good compatibility with the type of failure in the prototype scale. The device consists of a steel frame, storage tank, pacification tank to restrict the flow of water that is drawn from the storage tank by the pump where a relatively large size pump has been chosen to reduce the number of revolutions per minute, conveyance pipes to transfer water, control valve to control the discharge, and the power switch. The walls and the base of the flume are made using Plexiglas plates. The main calibration results show an actual failure mechanism for the riverbank's existing Tigris River soil model and the other two models as references. The average of two side riverbank's settlement was 19.4 mm at long-term conditions (24 h of channel operation), whereas it was around 11.6 mm in the short term (4 h of channel operation). This behavior shows that most settlement occurs quickly due to the mobilization of the tension cracks along the banks. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.