Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference:	EP/K015117/1
Title:	THE INFLUENCE OF SAND-MUD INTERACTIONS ON MIXED SEDIMENT DYNAMICS
Principal Investigator:	Cuthbertson, Dr AJS
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Department:	Sch of the Built Environment
Organisation:	Heriot-Watt University
Scheme:	First Grant - Revised 2009
Starts:	01 August 2013	Ends:	31 January 2015	Value (£):	99,392
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:	Coastal & Waterway Engineering
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:	Water
Related Grants:
Panel History:	Panel Date Panel Name Outcome 24 Jan 2013 Engineering Prioritisation Meeting - 24/25 January 2013 Announced
Summary on Grant Application Form
Estuaries and near-shore coastal zones are amongst the most productive, dynamic and complex ecosystems in the world. Their high environmental, social and economic value is reflected in EU and UK government policy through legislation targeted at managing these assets in sustainable and integrated ways. This policy is tasked with balancing future economic growth from continued human activities (e.g. ports, navigation, marine renewables), socio-economic impacts from increasing coastal erosion and flood risk, and the protection and enhancement of sensitive habitats and ecosystems. Under these competing demands, there is an urgent need for coordinated sediment management plans for UK estuaries and coastal regions to ensure sustainable practices are implemented and improved resilience in future planning strategies is realised. To achieve these challenging goals, it is vital that engineers and scientists have the fundamental understanding of physical processes controlling the dynamic behaviour of sediments in estuarine and coastal systems and their role in large-scale morphological evolution. One of the biggest challenges to this, however, is a current lack of knowledge on the behaviour of mixed bed sediments that contain both non-cohesive sands and cohesive muds. Critical shortcomings in current estuarine and coastal modelling systems typically relate to their inadequate representation of important small-scale dynamical processes associated with these sand-mud mixtures including erosion, entrainment, flocculation, settling and deposition. As a consequence, the sensitivity of many estuaries and near-shore coastal regions to future impacts from climate change and anthropogenic development is currently subject to a high degree of uncertainty. The proposed project will address these shortcomings in a systematic way. The research programme includes fundamental experimental studies in sophisticated settling column and benthic annular flume facilities to investigate these mixed sediment processes in greater quantitative detail than previously undertaken. This experimental work will be complemented by novel analytical model developments to provide better understanding of mixed sediment flocculation and differential settling processes through more physics-based descriptions of the important sand-mud interactions involved. A key outcome from this research will be to establish, for the first time, important linkages between these sand-mud interactions within mixed sediment suspensions and the resulting structural and compositional characteristics of mixed sediment bed deposits. The combined experimental data and analytical model outputs from this project will underpin the development of advanced numerical models required for the development of more sustainable and resilient estuarine and coastal sediment management strategies in the future.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Organisation Website:	http://www.hw.ac.uk