Flushing Capacity of a Stored Volume of Water: An Experimental Study

This paper presents a systematic analysis of the hydraulic flushing capacity of a stored volume of water to remove sediments. This analysis is based on 90 laboratory experiments in which the volume of sediment evacuated was measured for varying initial volumes of water, three bed slopes, and three sediment sizes. The experiments consisted of the rapid emptying of a reservoir by means of suddenly opening a tilting gate downstream. This opening produced an accelerated flow which eroded the mobile bed of the reservoir. The efficacy of flushing, herein defined as the ratio of the volume of sediments evacuated to the volume of water released, increased with the initial slope, and decreased as the initial volume of water increased. In relation to the sediment size, while the results obtained for the coarse and medium sands were very similar to each other, the results obtained for the fine sand were affected by the existence of apparent cohesion in the mobile bed. In comparison to the results obtained for the medium and coarse sands, this apparent cohesion reduced the volume of sediment evacuated by a given volume of water and hence, the efficacy of flushing.