Vegetated Channel Flows: Turbulence Anisotropy at Flow-Rigid Canopy Interface

This laboratory study aimed at investigating the mean and turbulent characteristics of a densely vegetated flow by testing four different submergence ratios. The channel bed was covered by a uniform array of aligned metallic cylinders modeling rigid submerged vegetation. Instantaneous velocities, acquired with a three-component acoustic Doppler velocimeter (ADV), were used to analyze the mean and turbulent flow structure. The heterogeneity of the flow field was described by the distributions of mean velocities, turbulent intensities, skewness, kurtosis, Reynolds stresses, and Eulerian integral scales. The exchange processes at the flow-vegetation interface were explored by applying the turbulence triangle technique, a far less common technique for vegetated flows based on the invariant maps of the anisotropic Reynolds stress tensor.