A review and assessment of longshore sediment transport equations for coarse-grained beaches

摘要

Previous assessments of analytical longshore sediment transport formulae have been heavily biased towards sand-sized sediment. All have noted the shortage of high quality field data from coarse-grained beaches against which to test predictions of longshore transport rates. In this paper, 12 existing formulae were identified as being potentially applicable for coarse-grained sediments and predictions from these formaulae are compared using a measured annual transport rate from a shingle beach and a concurrent hindcast wave climate. Two new empirical equations are also derived, one from a numeircal model calibrated against the same data set, the other derived from field experiments on coarse grained beaches. Energetics-based equations are found to give reasonable predictions of the shingle transport, despite being derived from sand beaches.