PiCASSO XL - particle collisions in natural wat

The sediment balance of many rivers is disturbed by human and climate change-related impacts. There are sections of rivers where there is too much sediment and those where there is too little. This leads to many ecological and economic problems. In order to develop suitable sediment management strategies, there is still a lack of physical understanding of when and how quickly sediments move in the river. It is now known that sediment collisions play an important role in this. In the project, stone collisions are measured under natural conditions. Velocity measurements with state-of-the-art laser measurement technology are used as well as "smart" stones. These have a built-in sensor that can measure accelerations and angular velocities. The experiments are used to develop a collision model. This can be used to calculate stone collisions in computer simulations. To date, only spherical collisions and collisions of geometrically simple bodies can be described well. However, little is known about how collisions of arbitrarily shaped stones behave. This gap is being closed in the project.