
Reservoir water storage is essential for human safety and economic development, and it is critically affected by sedimentation. Besides the loss of volume of water storage, the reservoir sedimentation can also affect fluvial and coastal morphology and aquatic ecosystems downstream of the dam. This project aims to study the contribution of turbidity currents triggered by bank erosion processes to reservoir sedimentation through the experimental simulation of these flows, which transport sediment to long distances. The experiments will be developed at the Environmental Fluid Mechanics Laboratory of the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) using an existing infrastructure, which will be adapted to the purposes of the present research. The main expected results of this framework are to understand: how the sediment eroded from the bank evolves to a turbidity current, how the turbidity current erodes, transports and deposits the sediments, and its contribution to the overall reservoir sedimentation.