Determining the onset of hydrodynamic erosion in turbulent flow

We revisit the longstanding question of the onset of sediment transport driven by a turbulent fluid flow via laboratory measurements. We use particle-tracking velocimetry to quantify the fluid flow as well as the motion of individual grains. As we increase the flow speed above the threshold for sediment transport, we observe that an increasing fraction of grains is transported downstream, although the average downstream velocity of the transported grains remains roughly constant. However, we find that the fraction of mobilized grains does not vanish sharply at a critical flow rate. Additionally, the distribution of the fluctuating velocities of nontransported grains becomes broader with heavier tails, meaning that unambiguously separating mobile and static grains is not possible. As an alternative approach, we quantify the statistics of grain velocities by using a mixture model consisting of two forms for the grain velocities: a decaying-exponential tail, which represents grains transported downstream, and a peaked distribution centered at zero velocity, which represents grains that fluctuate due to the turbulent flow but remain in place. Our results suggest that more sophisticated statistical measures may be required to quantify grain motion near the onset of sediment transport, particularly in the presence of turbulence.