CHEN Wen-xue 1, TAN Shui-wei 2, WANG Xiao-song 2 (1. State Key Laboratory of Simulation and Regulation of Water Cycle in River Basin, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China; 2. Department of Hydraulics, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing 100038, China)

Abstract: Geotextile sandbag is a kind of flexible eco-friendly revetment material, which has been widely used in slope protection of rivers and lakes, reclamation of mining areas, slope protection of highways and railways, and green roofs et al. The hydraulic characteristics of the sandbag structures are less studied, limiting its application in the riverside or shoreline protection. The dimensionless erosion loss formula of the sandbag structures is deduced based on the dimensional analysis, and the wave erosion characteristics of the sandbag structures are experimentally investigated. The experiments show that when the wave erosion period is expressed with dimensionless value, the wave period has no effect on the wave erosion of the structures, and the wave erosion loss rate of the sandbag structures has a non-linear relation with the wave height. Therefore, the sandbag structure should be properly protected from the wave erosion before the vegetation growth of the seeded bags under the condition of large wave.

Key words: geotextile sandbag structure, revetment, wave erosion

Published in: Journal of Hydraulic Engineering, Vol. 44, No. 9, 2013