Evaluating the Accuracy of Conventional Methods Forestimating Bed-load Transport Rate Using Field Data

Determining the exact value of bed load is concerned with investigators. A lot of papers were developed for estimation the bed load sediment transport in various geometrical and hydraulically conditions. But due to complicated flow and sediment interconnection, high discrepancy ratio exist between the estimated and measured values. Thus a best bed load estimator formula must be selected in each river according to geometrical and hydraulically conditions. In this study also, using sets of field data from the two rivers, Kurau and Ara, located in Malaysia, accuracy of 12-bed load transport equation will be assessed. Results show that Meyer-Peter and Muller (1948), Julien (2002) and Wilson (1996) equations, respectively, compared to the other equations give better results and the method of Meyer-Peter and Muller (1948) yields the best results for field data with 61.4% of the predicted transport rates in the range of discrepancy ratio between 0.5 and 2.