STUDY ON THE ANGLE OF REPOSE OF NONUNIFORM SEDIMENT

A conception of exposure degree is used in this article to account for the hiding and exposure mechanism of nonuniform sediment transport. The force arms of particles on the bed slope are assumed to be a function of the exposure degree, which is stochastically related to the size and gradation of bed materials. Based on this conception, the formula for the angle of repose of nonuniform sediment is developed. The angle of repose of nonuniform sediment is experimentally investigated in rotation drum at the rolling motion of sediment particles. The nonuniform sediment is gotten from the mixture of two kinds of uniform sediment with different weight ratios and two experimental plans that one for changing the weight ratio of two kinds of uniform sediment from 1:9 to 9:1 and the other changing the uniform sediment size and weight ratio are used. The effect of the rotation speed and the filling degree on the angle of repose is investigated, too. Finally, the formula has been tested against a wide range of laboratory data, the prediction by the newly proposed formulas is very good.