Sediment Transfer through the Fluvial System (Proceedings of a symposium held in Moscow, August 2004). IAHS Publ. 288, 2004, 377–385

1 Dipartimento di Ingegneria idraulica ed Applicazioni Ambientali, Facoltà di Ingegneria, Università di Palermo,
Viale delle Scienze, I-90128, Italy

2 Department of Civil Engineering, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Abstract Regime channel formation is a delicate adaptation to the imposed environmental conditions compatible with flow and sediment transport mechanisms. The present paper concerns the computation of the regime configuration of a meandering stream. It is supposed that the channel develops until it reaches the state of "final thermodynamic equilibrium", where the ratio of the kinetic energy of the flow to its cross-sectional potential energy is minimum. An optimization procedure that allows the analysis of the regime channel formation is presented and it is checked using a real case.

Key words predictive model; regime configuration; river’s plane-form evolution