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Erosion of biofilm-bound fluvial sediments

Nature Geoscience volume 6, pages 770–774 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

The movement of fluvial sediment shapes our rivers. Understanding sediment entrainment has been a goal of hydraulic engineers for almost a century1,2. Previous sediment entrainment models have been informed by laboratory experiments using grains that were free from biological material3. In natural river settings, however, sediments are invariably covered by bacteria, often forming visible biofilms, which comprise diverse consortia of species housed in sticky extracellular polysaccharides. Here we report experiments in a laboratory flume with cyanobacteria grown over sediment. We show that the prevailing model, where grains roll over one another at some critical threshold in shear velocity, does not hold for biofilm-bound sediments. Instead, biostabilized sediment behaves more like an elastic membrane. Fluid flow produces oscillations in the membrane, which can become unstable. Beyond a particular threshold in velocity, the membrane fails catastrophically by ripping and clumps of biofilm-bound sediment become entrained. We use a mathematical model of an oscillating membrane in incompressible flow to show that unstable oscillations will occur over a wide range of elastic material properties at realistic river flow velocities. We find that the horizontal length scale over which oscillations occur is a controlling factor for incipient sediment entrainment of biostabilized sediments.

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Figure 1: Schematic diagrams of fluid flow in our flumes causing an elastic composite of sediment grains and biofilm on the bed to oscillate.
Figure 2: Neutral stability curves predicted for perturbations in the capped flume (Fig. 1a) with biofilm–sand (blue) and biofilm–bead (red) composite properties given in Table 1.
Figure 3: Neutral stability curves predicted for perturbations in the open flume (Fig. 1b) with sand–biofilm (blue) and bead–biofilm (red) composite properties given in Table 1.
Figure 4: The flow velocity in a section down the centre line of the open channel flume was recorded using PIV.

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Acknowledgements

W.T.S. is an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) UK Advanced Research Fellow and this research was supported by EPSRC grants EP/F007868/1 and EP/D073693/1 and Natural Environment Research Council grant NE/D522211/1.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK

    Elisa Vignaga & William T. Sloan

  2. Department of Mathematics, University of Strathclyde, G1 1XQ, UK

    David M. Sloan

  3. School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK

    Xiaoyu Luo

  4. School of the Built Environment, Heriot Watt University, EH14 1AS, UK

    Heather Haynes

  5. School of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow, G12 8QQ, UK

    Vernon R. Phoenix

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  1. Elisa Vignaga
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  3. Xiaoyu Luo
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  4. Heather Haynes
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Contributions

E.V. conducted the experimental research; E.V., H.H., V.R.P. and W.T.S. planned the experiments; X.L., D.M.S. and W.T.S. formulated the mathematics; D.M.S. was responsible for the numerics; W.T.S. undertook the computing and W.T.S. and D.M.S. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to William T. Sloan.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Vignaga, E., Sloan, D., Luo, X. et al. Erosion of biofilm-bound fluvial sediments. Nature Geosci 6, 770–774 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo1891

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