ASSESSING THE SUSPENDED SEDIMENT CONCENTRATION BY MEANS OF ACOUSTIC DOPPLER ECHO PROFILING

To obtain valuable information about rivers and water courses, scientists and engineers often rely on monitoring stations. These monitoring stations allow to measure several quantities that play a role in hydroenvironmental problems. One of these key variables is the suspended sediment concentration (SSC). In this paper the application of an acoustic based method to determine the SSC in a river is presented. This method is founded on the sonar equation and uses the echo information from an Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP) to assess the SSC. The results from a monitoring station in the river Devoll in Albania are here presented and the method application is discussed. The advantages and disadvantages are highlighted and directions to improve the method are discussed

Development of a method for suspended sediment transport monitoring by means of ADCP measurements

Monitoring stations in rivers and water courses are an important mean to obtain critical data about the different variables that play a role in the hydrodynamics and ecological processes. Measuring suspended sediment concentration often requires the displacement of equipment and manpower to the field. This is often expensive and not practical, in particular during severe weather and flow conditions. A method to determine the suspended sediment concentration as a result of ADCP remote measurements is here presented. This method relies on the relationship between the attenuation to backscatter ratio and the normalized attenuation coefficient. To test this method, data from a field monitoring station in Kokel, on the banks of the Devoll river in Albania, is used