Grain Shape Effects on Entrainment

Ongoing PhD Work with Taylor Perron

Predicting bedload sediment transport is central to applications ranging from hazard assessment to reconstructioning ancient climates on Mars. Yet existing transport models remain imprecise. A key source of uncertainty is grain shape. Recent work by Deal et al. (2023) introduced a shape-corrected transport law demonstrating that natural grains exhibit transport and flux behaviors that differ markedly from spheres, which are often used in experiments. Building on this work, I am analyzing videos from their flume experiments to investigate how grain shape affects the mechanics of individual entrainment events. These findings will provide essential ground truth on grain-scale processes, thereby improving sediment transport predictions across Earth and planetary environments.

Video of spheres and natural grains moving in a flume, from Deal et al. 2023