New Paper: Flocs in a decaying shear field

Our paper on flocs in a decaying turbulent shear field, similar to what a packet of mud might experience in a river mouth plume, was recently published in JGR Oceans (link to the paper). The paper presents some of Ali Keyvani’s very nice PhD experiments. The two key elements we look at are how close the flocs are at any point in time to their equilibrium size, i.e. the size that flocs will eventually reach for a particular shear rate given enough time; and (2) we estimate how big of a difference any growth in floc size would make on the settling velocity of the mud. We also examine how inclusion of various approaches to account for flocculation impacts the plume concentration and deposition rates in a simple river mouth discharge model (see figure below).

PlumeModel