Lateral turbulent dispersion in compound channels: Some experimental and field results

This paper presents and discusses some results of experiments in simple channels, then investigates the lateral variation of the mixing coefficients λ in compound channels. Average λ values in both simple channels and in the main channels of compound channels are obtained. For compound channels, the relative depth (H-h)∕H and the relative width, are used to analyze the influence of the compound channel on the λ value. The experiments on the lateral distribution of turbulent mixing coefficients were conducted at the University of Birmingham. In this paper, some new parameters are introduced to describe lateral and mixing dispersion in both simple and compound channels. Some of field data on turbulent dispersion in the Lasha River (Tibet, China) is also listed and analyzed in this paper.